Jonty Claypole

Yeah, and one of the narrative threads in the book is precisely what you're describing.

It's Lee's identity separating increasingly from her background and her family.

And there's a point quite late in the book where she says, my identity now was the alt-identity.

It was the identity.

I was no longer part of that world.

And in some of the final scenes, when she's back home with her parents, she has nothing to say.

She's almost silent because she's so separate from them.

On your earlier point about this linking to the American tradition of the Great Gatsby, yes, that's completely true.

And I think in terms of deciding to do our fourth book in this series is leaping across the Great Pond, as they used to say, leaping across to America.

Part of our intention is to see how the school novel, how school fiction becomes different in an American context.

And I think it's precisely that.

It's the great gapsification of the school book.

Because if you take the previous books, we've done it in this series, none of the heroes are outsiders in the school system as such.

Like Tom Brown, he is Cross Sugarman.

In this book, he would be Cross Sugarman.

And then in the prime of Miss Jean Brody, the whole point about the girls is they're not outsiders.

Jean Brody wants them to be the creme de la creme.

And as we joked about, they're completely unexceptional.

They are just part of the middle-class world of Edinburgh.

And the outsider is Jean Brody herself.