Description
An Independent Best Book to Look Out For in 2025
At an elite secondary school in the English countryside, students and teachers cope with a sudden loss.
In the aftermath of a shocking death, students and teachers at an elite English school grapple with their disorientation and grief. Yet the bell continues to ring, and amidst grief, normal life—lessons, arguments, flirtations—goes on. At the seeming center of the clock’s sweeping hands is Tin, feared and adored in equal measure, and newly betrayed by Robin, her best friend. As the heat of the late spring day intensifies, allegiances strain and rivalries escalate, and old secrets start to surface.
Set against a backdrop of strikes and economic unrest, and across the stratified milieus of a small town in the late 1980s, Dark Like Under is at the same time languorous with sun-soaked, rural beauty. Thrumming with the richly detailed inner lives of its varied cast of characters, this luminous debut captures the promise and risk of late adolescence and is a profound exploration of resilience and connection, frustration and grief, renewal and the legacies we leave.
Praise for Dark Like Under
“Even in the face of tragedy, for those in the heady days of late adolescence, lessons go on, friendships falter and flirtations simmer, as Chadwick shows in her unique, evocative take on the coming-of-age novel.”
—Vogue UK
“This hypnotically written debut unfolds over a single day at a secondary school in the Eighties. A group of pupils are left reeling when they learn of the sudden death of a beloved teacher, tragic news that only exacerbates the tensions in the teenagers’ fraught friendships and tentative romantic relationships. It’s the sort of haunting novel that sticks in your mind long after you’ve put it down.”
—The Independent
“Intricate and subtle; an equally weighted attention to the richness of each character’s interior life, as they are shaped by the forces of personality, circumstance, culture and class. [Chadwick] really captures the intense intimacies and loneliness of adolescence, the complexity of people coming into being; and the teachers’ helplessness, exasperation, and tenderness. As the day draws to a close it leaves us on the cusp of all these imbricated, unfolding narratives even as we circle back to a devastating ending.”
—Amy Sackville, author of Orkney
“Full of breathtaking passages and invisible dramas of everyday lives and selves . . . this is a quiet, understated book but one of bottled magic.”
—The Bookseller (Editor’s Choice)
“So specifically good on the emotional life of teenagers and the adults who interact with them, Dark Like Under is generous, deeply immersive and occasionally startlingly close to the bone.”
—Lizzy Stewart, author of Alison
