Prone to Latin epithets, he wears a battered old gown covered in chalk dust and tea stains, is fond of Liquorice Allsorts and Gauloises, and enjoys a regular “modest libation” in the local pub, the Thirsty Scholar.
Harris’s main narrator is Latin master Roy Straitley, a St Oswald’s man born and bred, “sixty six on Bonfire Night, with a hundred and two terms under my fast-expanding belt”. The follow-up to 2005’s Gentlemen and Players, it’s set in a second-rate boys’ grammar school in the north of England and is a magnificently plotted and twisty journey to the heart of a 24-year-old crime, as well as a darkly humorous look at the march of progress in a 500-year-old institution. I f you’re suffering from a surfeit of psychological thrillers about dysfunctional women this summer post- Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and their ilk, then you could do a lot worse than turn to Joanne Harris’s latest, Different Class.
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