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 surprising death, students and teachers at an English school grapple with their grief. Yet the bell continues to ring, and normal life—lessons, arguments, flirtations—goes on. 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, economic unrest, and the stratified milieus of a small town in the 1980s, Dark Like Under thrums with the richly detailed inner lives of its varied cast of characters. Alice Chadwick’s luminous debut captures the promise and risk of late adolescence in 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
“A slow and absorbing piece of literary fiction . . . Chadwick’s prose is delicate, precise and not without a little humour . . . Just lovely.”
—Marie Claire UK
“[T]here are moments of real beauty in this book: sentences so well written, so balanced and satisfying, I went back to enjoy them again.”
—Leaf Arbuthnot, The Telegraph
“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
[Chadwick’s] descriptive powers are remarkable . . . The period details are wonderfully accurate . . . But Chadwick is not just good at surfaces: she is also capable of brilliant characterization.”
—TLS
“Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic. For the reader, it is a day well spent.”
—The Guardian
“A strange, unsettling, but rather brilliant novel. The school comes across like a tinderbox, one that requires only a single tragedy to spark the flame that sets it alight.”
—Irish Times
“Chadwick is adept at finding the lesser tragedies bursting at the seams, amounting to a clever and compassionate debut.”
—The Observer
“An unpretentiously elegiac novel, it hymns nature’s solace and the power of human connection with memorable grace.”
—Daily Mail
“A hypnotically immersive book that pulled me into its spell so much that I half expected my name to be called out during the pupil’s English class.”
—The Crack Magazine
“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
