Dark Like Under

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By (author): Alice Chadwick

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.

AUTHOR

Alice Chadwick

Reviews

Praise forDark Like Under

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 Its the sort of haunting novel that sticks in your mind long after youve put it down

The Independent

Intricate and subtle an equally weighted attention to the richness of each characters 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 ofOrkney

Full of breathtaking passages and invisible dramas of everyday lives and selves this is a quiet understated book but one of bottled magic

The BooksellerEditors Choice

So specifically good on the emotional life of teenagers and the adults who interact with themDark Like Underis generous deeply immersive and occasionally startlingly close to the bone

Lizzy Stewart author ofAlison