The Rehearsal

MONTANA NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2009 - FICTION FINALIST

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance, and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve . . .

The Rehearsal is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire. Startlingly original, it is at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd exposé of emotional compromise. It introduces a boldly inventive and extraordinarily accomplished new voice in New Zealand fiction.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985. Born in Canada and raised in Canterbury, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for this, her first novel. She also won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition and the audience award at Once Upon a Deadline, a one-day story contest in the 2008 NZ International Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week. She is the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.