Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.
 
One afternoon in 1976, teenagers Jean and Tom share an almost imperceptible look across the grounds of Compton Manor,  a boarding school for boys with problems.  Their gaze marks a secret intimacy, one defined as much by violence as by friendship and desire. As the boys' connection deepens, so too does the risk that surrounds it...
 
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'Austerely beautiful... Jean is a darkly luminous, profound novel; there are passages that give the shock of the genuinely great.'  Garth Greenwell
 
'Incandescent...Few debuts are as textured, immersive, and psychological. Fewer still so humanely capture the wildness and abjection of the adolescent heart.'  Maggie Millner