41-Love

Praise for 41-Love:
"Thomas (Oligarchy) serves an ace of a memoir with this trenchant account about the pains of getting older . . . This window into midlife desire is cathartic, amusing reading for anyone who’s wanted desperately to win." —Publishers Weekly
 
"What, really, is a trophy? Scarlett Thomas' is covered in spikes, and may also be radioactive, but she plunks it down defiantly in this addictive memoir. A bracing statement on athleticism as continual work in progress, the limits of bodies, and the go-for-broke ambition to be exceptional." —Vikki Warner, author of Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady
 
Praise for Scarlett Thomas and Oligarchy:
"The privileged teenage girls in this dark comedy, attending a dysfunctional, third-string boarding school in the countryside north of London, get caught up in a mass-psychogenic, contagious version of anorexia nervosa. Thomas's prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"One of the funniest novels in recent years . . . It takes a special kind of audacity to write a comic novel about teenagers with eating disorders, but Thomas executes it brilliantly . . . It's Thomas' boldness, as well as her writing-every sentence seems painstakingly constructed-that make Oligarchy such a remarkable novel. It's brash, bizarre and original, an unflinching look at a group of young women who have become 'hungry ghosts, flickering on the edge of this world.'" —Michael Schaub, NPR

"Scarlett Thomas, a British writer who excels at delivering novels about difficult subjects, turns her brilliant, incisive gaze to a boarding school in Oligarchy . . . A strange but urgent glimpse into society's often conflicting expectations of girls." —Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post