The Truants

Jessica Walker, the 19-year-old narrator of British author Weinberg’s promising but uneven debut, enrolls at a university in East Anglia to study under prize-winning writer Lorna Clay, best known for The Truants, a book that argues debauchery is fundamental to artistic brilliance. Lorna’s current focus is the “rescue” of Agatha Christie and other female authors who have been “dismissed from the canon as irrelevant.” The semester starts strong, with Jess impressing Lorna and finding friends who also subscribe to the charismatic professor’s hedonistic philosophies. Jess, fellow English major Georgie, South African journalist and visiting fellow Alec, and second-year geology student Nick are initially inseparable, but then triangles form and jealousies flare. When betrayal finally tears the group apart, Jess turns to Lorna for advice and support; as it happens, though, Lorna has secrets and an agenda of her own. Weinberg writes incisively and evocatively about infatuation, heartbreak, and grief, but what begins as a tense, taut, character-driven slow burn succumbs to coincidence and melodrama. Weinberg aims high, but misses her mark. [em]Agent: Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit (U.K.). (Jan.) [/em]