The Rehearsal - Softcover

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. "The Rehearsal" is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Canterbury, New Zealand. She won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for this, her first novel. She also won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short-story competition, the 2008 audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary. She currently lives in Iowa.