A heartbreaking story of friendship and betrayal - can we ever forgive the ones we love the most?
'Prep meets The Secret History meets Mean Girls - a stunning debut novel' Esther Walker, author of The Bad Mother
1996. Freya Seymour and Josephine Grey are invincible - beautiful and brilliant, the two best friends are on the cusp of Oxbridge, and the success they always dreamed they'd share.
2014. Freya gets in touch, looking for a conversation Josephine has run away from for eighteen long and tortured years.
Beginning with one ill-fated night, The Exclusives charts the agonising spiral of friendship gone wrong, the heartache and betrayal of letting down those closest to you and the poisonous possibilities of what we wouldn't do when everything we prize is placed under threat.
And in the end, as she realises she cannot run for ever, Josephine must answer one question: is it Freya she cannot face, or is it her own darkest secret?
'Utterly gripping' Esther Freud
'Compellingly dark, brilliantly gripping: Rebecca Thornton takes a scalpel to the heart of female friendship.' - Elizabeth Day, author of Scissors, Paper, Stone Rebecca Thornton is an alumna of the Faber Academy Writing A Novel course, where she was tutored by Esther Freud and Tim Lott. Her writing has been published in Prospect Magazine, The Guardian, You Magazine, Daily Mail and The Sunday People, The Jewish News, amongst others. She has reported from the Middle East, Kosovo and the UK. She now lives in West London with her husband and two sons. A heartbreaking story of friendship and betrayal - can we ever forgive the ones we love the most? A suspenseful and emotional novel, perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Rosamund Lupton Set in an elite private girl's boarding school (a world the author knows well), the novel interrogates the pressure we put on our children In its claustrophobic academic setting and emotional power, the novel resembles Donna Tartt's bestselling debut, The Secret History Compellingly dark, brilliantly gripping: Rebecca Thornton takes a scalpel to the heart of female friendship. I enjoyed this story about friendship, how bonds are made, how they can be broken and what happens afterwards, enormously. The setting combined with the secrets, yes there is more than one, cause a powder-keg of tension and I could only wonder what the result would be when the whole thing went up - I wasn't disappointed.
