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The Lessons
  • Published: 3 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141917665
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Lessons




A spellbinding novel about shattered hopes, destructive love and dark family secrets from the author of the Orange New Writers Award-winning novel Disobedience

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.

  • Published: 3 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141917665
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

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