She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by the Queen. Onward to Lethe (Forgetfulness) with the dilemma of childhood memories versus imagination, what is real and what is false? Fortunately, despite having had a heart attack and being offered retirement, Classics master Roy Straitley is still in his post, determined that he will not be put out to pasture and is still teaching Latin to his boys - but, of course, he now has young girls to contend with. It can work as a standalone as I didn't feel lost but I definitely want to read more about this world.

The battle between the then and the now, the fight against the patriarchy, the control and apparent ease within the writing is just outstanding. The third book of the Malbry Series, A Narrow Door by Joanne Harris as brilliant as the other two with two differents; can shelf it as a feminist, and although the story is great, but it's a pity that Roy Straitley is a sub-character this time. This is the last of a trio of novels set in St Oswald’s Grammar School (GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS and DIFFERENT CLASS), featuring Roy Straitley, the elderly and quixotic Latin Master, and his personal battle against Suits, e-mail, parents and the passage of time.Needless to say, as is to be expected from this author, the story that unfolds is beautifully and intelligently written. This brings her, as a junior teacher, to take a job at King Henry’s School, St Oswald’s traditional rival, where Conrad vanished without trace nearly 20 years before. The feminist agenda were spot on and I love every single bit of it, the layers of Rebecca's story and her past gets unfolded also makes me think if anything that had happened is real. Taking his fears to Rebecca Buckfast, Straitley is talked out of reporting his suspicions to the police by the Head’s assurance that it is very unlikely to be a real body and that she will deal with the situation herself.

Becky aims to demonstrate that Roy is wrong about woman, that her ambition will throw open these hallowed narrow doors wide by, shock, horror, admitting female students. A Narrow Door’ is a compulsive journey through the dark places of the human mind, where memory, truth and fact melt away like mirages. This is a recurring idea in my books, in which children are seldom innocent, but exist in a secret, savage world of their own. I can’t say too much more about the plot for fear of spoilers, but what I can say is that Joanne Harris's descriptions of the old school, with its quads, its ancient buildings, its bell tower and its dusty corridors, are very well done and particularly evocative for those who, like me, have attended or who work in a traditional school like St Oswald's - in fact it was this part of the book that I found especially enjoyable. Before the school year has even started in earnest, Straitley is approached by his Brodie Boys from his old class, who have made a shocking discovery - the building site appears to have turned up a body.I enjoyed the ending, and not just because I could now stop reading a story that seemed at times to move along glacially. This year, new challenges await; not least the death and subsequent disgrace of Straitley’s best friend, Eric Scoones, plus the arrival of girls in the School, and the appointment of a Headmistress, the first in the School’s 500-year history.

It is true that the reader will need to suspend their disbelief at times, but also true that Ms Harris takes her readers on a dark and twisty journey with this third St Oswald’s novel and I was wrong-footed on more than one occasion during the course of the story. The plot revolves around the fallout from a pivotal event that occurred when Rebecca was five years old. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The story unfolds as they reveal their stories to each other and the reader is drawn deep into the complex events of the past.You know the books that keep you hooked enough to keep reading even when you’re not necessarily enjoying them? One of the coolest tricks Harris has, she doesn't force her opinion on the character, keeps it as neutral as possible for you to figure out it yourself. Previously a school solely for boys, not even with any female staff, they are merging with Mulberry House meaning that they will now have female students and staff. Onto Cocytus (Lamentation) which is spine tingling, hair raising and jaw dropping especially the archaic nature of male dominated King Henry’s in its dismissiveness of any femininity. Her life changed from that day – her parents never got over his disappearance and emotionally they disappeared from her life too.