Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life

Scarlett Thomas’s Oligarchy somehow manages to be a riotously funny novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders

issue 09 November 2019

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points.

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