Prep - Softcover

Lee Fiora is a shy fourteen-year-old when she leaves small-town Indiana for Ault School in Massachusetts. Her head is filled with images from the school brochure of handsome boys in sweaters leaning against old brick buildings, girls running with lacrosse sticks across pristine athletics fields, everyone singing hymns in chapel. But as she soon learns, Ault is a minefield of unstated rules and incomprehensible social rituals, and Lee must work hard to find - and maintain - her place in the pecking order.

'The OC mets Donna Tartt's The Secret History with flashes of Clueless . . . Prep doesn't come sugar-coated: it is a dark and obsessive examination of the cruelty of the coolness hierarchy . . . Sittenfeld's strength is in making this experience feel universal . . . Everyone will wince with recognition at the horror of being a teenager. It's great to relive it all, now that it is happening to someone else' Observer

'Straightforward, serious, funny . . . There is so much that is right about this book. Sittenfeld captures the hothouse atmosphere of boarding-school, the way you see even people you don't like in their underwear . . . Mostly, however, it's Lee's voice that makes all this worthwhile' London Review of Books

'You don't have to have attended an elite Massachusetts boarding school to find yourself reliving your adolescence in Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep . . . Even the Cross Sugarmans (major crush) and Aspeth Montgomerys (long legs, super popular) of this world will cringe with recognition at the book's fine-knit accuracy and detail' Vogue

'Sweet Valley High as written by George Eliot. Sittenfeld is a pin-sharp observer, and in Prep she needles away at class, race and character . . . Prep is unflinching and never twee, and will appeal to any age . . . A highly accomplished novel' Independent on Sunday

'Curtis Sittenfeld shares with Salinger a knack of capturing, in effortless prose, a teenage mindset . . . It feels important . . . Most vitally of all, it feels like adolescence' The Times