Sabine
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“This book is The Secret History meets Interview with the Vampire. It’s campy, creepy, sensational fun that’s hardly life-sucking” (Daily Candy).
A sensual and Gothic tale of obsession and sexual awakening, Sabine “was deemed so scandalous by its author that she refused to put her name to it. But despite its lusty content, the real shock is the scary secret unearthed toward the end” (Reveal).
It is the 1950s and existentialism is flourishing in Paris. But Viola, a seventeen-year-old English girl, is languishing in an elite boarding school in the dull French countryside. Under the distracted tutelage of Aimée, the students lounge about the crumbling gray château playing records and smoking Gitanes, awaiting the arrival of some suitable distraction.
Then a new teacher arrives—Sabine—with her long, tanned legs and mane of golden hair. Sabine questions everything and challenges the girls to look at their world anew. Passion strikes Viola. But there are sinister forces at play in the château and when Sabine becomes ill with a blood disorder, Viola uncovers a dangerous secret . . .
In this “irresistible gothic potboiler . . . the anonymous author of this ardent girl-for-girl romance evokes the mesmerizing quality of a dream at dusk, meshed with an appropriately overheated, breathless, and hormone-driven narrative voice” (Booklist).
“A.P. writes superbly, whoever she or he may be . . . Sabine is an enchanting novel that deserves to be a cult classic.” —The Daily Telegraph
“Anonymous A.P marvelously re-creates the hormonal anguish of the fey teenagers.” —Publishers Weekly
“A sexy, Gothic tale.” —Harpers & Queen
“Remarkable . . . creepy.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lust and mischief erupt amid a group of languorous 17-year-old mostly English aristocrats at a boarding school in the French provinces circa 1958. Author "A.P." assumes the voice of one of the five youths, Viola, who writes in hindsight: a motherless only child, Viola is sent by her fashionable father to the lax, elderly "Tante Aim e," who runs the derelict chateau academy. Viola & Co. are squirming with boredom when the medical student Sabine arrives as an emergency substitute instructor. An intellectual only slightly older than they who hails from a genteelly impoverished family of the region, Sabine is as irreverent as James Dean, and as dangerously irresistible. Sabine lambastes Viola, who becomes her favorite, for living in a "soap bubble" of privilege, and exhorts her to embrace longing, fury, humiliation, suffering in short, to live. Viola obliges by falling passionately in love with her instructor and is shattered when her lovely, ferocious beloved accepts the advances of the most eligible young bachelor of the school's chateau set. When Viola grows bizarrely convinced that Sabine's illness is the result of vampirism, the novel turns pure, over-the-top, one-handed camp. Anonymous A.P marvelously re-creates the hormonal anguish of the fey teenagers.
