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. Startlingly original, it is at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expos?? of emotional compromise. It introduces a boldly inventive and extraordinarily accomplished new voice in New Zealand fiction.
Reviews
`It represents a starburst of talent, the arrival of an author wholly different from anyone else writing today' - Sunday Times
`Alarmingly good: a super-confident and exhilarating novel that marks Catton as a rare and exciting new talent' - Metro
`Startlingly original' - Time Out
'A wonderful debut by a truly exciting new writer' - Kate Atkinson
'An extremely accomplished debut novel' - Bookseller
'This could well be hailed as the most original, thought-provoking work of fiction published this year' - Waterstone's Books Quarterly
`As debuts go, this one is astral - as well as teasing, intelligent and knowing' - Scotsman
Author Biography
Eleanor Catton was born in 1985. Born in Canada and raised in Canterbury, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for this, her first novel. She also won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition and the audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week. She is the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.
