Sophie Gee

to the tale that she's trying to tell in this boarding school novel.

Killer line.

And that's kind of what's good about this book is that she doesn't create these kind of easy alliances or affinities between characters who are superficially alike.

She always interrupts it and kind of won't have her heroine collude with the obvious moves that the narrative's asking her to make.

I was thinking about something you said early on in this episode, Jonty, which is that this is the first time that we've had someone who is truly an outsider in

in the world of the school.

And you've made the great point that even in A Kestrel for a Knave, which is a story about poverty and outsiderness, it's about people who are left on the absolute margins, on the sort of swag pile of British modernisation in the Yorkshire coal mining towns.

Nonetheless, Billy Casper and

his family and his friends and their teachers, they are all insiders in this world.

They belong to the world and they all understand how it works.

One of the things I think that's distinctive about this novel is that it sort of turns the terms of A Kestrel for a Knave

exactly on its head.

So in A Kestrel for a Knave, it's really sort of all about characters whose lack of privilege, whose inability to be sort of absorbed into any kind of a system that could bring them success or project them forward.

in the class hierarchies of Britain, there is sort of no limit to the number of ways in which that's going to be frustrated.

And, you know, as Barry Hines said about that novel, as Ken Loach said about the film, they really wanted not to romanticise or idealise that story.

They really wanted to keep the idea intact that when you belong to the working classes, when you belong to those northern or midlands, multi-generational, impoverished working classes,

It might look like there's a way out, but there kind of isn't really a way out.

And I think that sort of what Curtis Sittenfeld is doing with PrEP and using the school to do it is to say that when you are born into a sense of limitless entitlement and access to literally anything that you want,

It gives you this seamless passage where you literally kind of never meet friction.

And actually, it sort of almost gives you the capacity to turn reality.