A Narrow Door: The electric psychological thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller

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Rebecca Buckfast is not new to the School, having been part of the Crisis Team brought in the previous year to try to turn the School’s fortunes around. I thoroughly enjoyed Gentlemen and Players and Different Class and this is a worthy third and final chapter in a series that follows the life of Latin teacher, Roy Straitley, and his fellow teachers and pupils at St Oswalds. However, I particularly enjoyed writing Rebecca because she is a rare example of a middle-aged woman protagonist in fiction, with all the nuance that entails. There were times when I couldn’t tell if there was a supernatural element to the book, or if that was simply mind games being played on or by the narrators. All of these books have at their heart the idea that the past controls what we do; shapes who we are, and cannot be hidden away for good.

Even her partner, Dominic, who genuinely cares for her, is himself part of the problem: he infantilizes and manipulates her whilst claiming to do what’s best for Becky and her daughter. Tā ir tā pati skola, kurā mācījās viņas brālis, kurš pazuda bez vēsts, kad Rebekai bija vien 5 gadi. But Harris used the trope so deftly, and I truly felt as though I was making Rebecca’s discoveries alongside her. Reporting the find to the new Head, Straitley is astonished to find that she already knows, and using his fierce loyalty to the School – which would surely not survive yet another scandal – as well as his desire to keep Scoones’ dark secret, Buckfast persuades Straitley to listen to her story.Before the school year has even started in earnest, Straitley is approached by his Brodie Boys from his old class, who have made a shocking discovery - the building site appears to have turned up a body. Once it gets going though, it’s a real page turner with twists and turns along the way, like all good psychological thrillers. It is hard to stop reading at any point because the reader, like Roy, develops a desperate need to find out the truth. As Rebecca tells these stories of her childhood, the birth of her daughter at aged 16, finding husband Dominic when her daughter was six years old and then becoming a teacher at King Henry's, the very school her brother attended when he went missing, we discover that she may know something regarding his disappearance. This is a recurring theme in a lot of my books: including how we see ourselves and portray ourselves to others, as well as how we see others, and how often we can be wrong.

Whilst not a particular fan of Dark Academia as a genre, I very much enjoyed two of the previous books in this series – Gentlemen and Players and Different Class. And when Straitley suffers another heart attack and is hospitalised soon afterwards, he has to trust that Ms Buckfast will do as she has promised - but firstly, his head teacher tells him, he must listen to the story of the disappearance many years’ ago of her elder brother before deciding if his suspicions need to be reported to the authorities. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter. Joanne Harris has produced a masterly work of fiction, a novel which demands your attention and has you clinging to it wishing it would never end. But as the ground shifts beneath the old guards' feet, a body is discovered, along with a Prefect's badge from another school.This year, new challenges await; not least the death and subsequent disgrace of Straitley’s best friend, Eric Scoones, plus the arrival of girls in the School, and the appointment of a Headmistress, the first in the School’s 500-year history. The author could have condensed this by 100 pages to achieve a succinct novel, with the intrigue but without the frustration. However, whilst I enjoyed the powerful feminist vibes peppered throughout, the story itself was slow and tiresome. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology and fantasy.

Eric was his dear friend but revelations about him have tainted how he remembers their relationship. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I am discovering Joanne Harris with a different angle and am positively surprised how good she is when writing thriller/mystery. I will admit that the pace did slow a little in the middle but then picked up and the ever twisting turns were a surprising delight.The pace and tempo increases in Phlegethan (Burning) where tension is as taut as piano wire as the narrow door of suspicion crashes and burns and is battered down in Styx (hate). Set just a year after the events in 'A Different Class', we find Classics teacher Roy Straitley still trying to uphold tradition but fighting a losing battle - the new headmaster is a woman, the school has gone co-educational (it is now St Oswald's Academy) and a new leisure facility is being built on the grounds. We like to think of children as inhabiting a special, insulated world: to think of them as fierce, sometimes cruel, emotionally independent beings with their own personality and agency is troubling, but necessary.

It does work as a stand-alone story, but, ideally, read the previous books first, before embarking on this one. Taking his fears to Rebecca Buckfast, Straitley is talked out of reporting his suspicions to the police by the Head’s assurance that it is very unlikely to be a real body and that she will deal with the situation herself. Her descriptions were evocative and vivid, it helped to absorb you into the web the protagonist was trying to weave. Of course, Freud would have had a lot to say about the tunnel as an image; in this case, it’s one of repression – the repression of memory, of sexuality, of feelings.

Although he does not share the new Head’s vision for the School, Straitley views Buckfast as a worthy opponent, and looks forward to taking up her challenge – that is, until a group of pupils report finding what looks like human remains on the site of a new building project.