Summer Reads 2010 - About Naomi Alderman
Author Biography
Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; it was read on BBC radio's Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. She has published prize-winning short fiction in a number of anthologies. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City and in 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin's online We Tell Stories project. She writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Penguin published her second novel, The Lessons, in April 2010.
Selected Quotes:
"Naomi Alderman is, evidently, not afraid of ghosts. She courts them and flirts with them and defies them in her darkly seductive second novel, The Lessons."
Damian Barr, Independent on Sunday
"No one writes about pain better than Alderman. Lose yourself in 278 pages and you enter another world."
Liz Hoggard, Evening Standard
“A remarkable novel, which portrays with uncomfortable accuracy the feted world of the Oxford undergraduate. It reminds me a great deal of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, in that it has the same brooding sense of menace and the same lightning characterisation.”
Joanne Harris
The Lessons synopsis
Hidden away in an Oxford back street is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any but the few who possess a key to its unassuming front gate. Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous.
Mark gathers around him an impressionable group of students: glamorous Emmanuella, who always has a new boyfriend in tow; Franny and Simon, best friends and occasional lovers; musician Jess, whose calm exterior hides passionate depths. And James, already damaged by Oxford and looking for a group to belong to.
For a time they live in a charmed world of learning and parties and love affairs. But university is no grounding for adult life, and when, years later, tragedy strikes they are entirely unprepared.
Universal in its themes of ambition, desire and betrayal, this spellbinding novel reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late.
Other books by Naomi Alderman• Disobedience
Naomi’s websites
http://naomialderman.typepad.comhttp://naomialderman.nfshost.com/index.htm 