Scarlett Thomas

Scarlett Thomas was born in London in 1972. She is the author of Oligarchy, The Seed Collectors, PopCo, and The End of Mr. Y. Her previous novels, including The End of Mr. Y, PopCo, and The Seed Collectors, have developed a cult following and sold more than half a million books worldwide. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Scarlett is a professor of creative writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Kent in the U.K.

Books

41-Love

A Memoir

A darkly funny sports memoir about a mid-life crisis, exercise addiction, tennis, and how to grow up when you really, really don't want to

At forty-one, Scarlett Thomas was a successful novelist and a senior academic. She’d quit smoking, gotten healthier, settled down in a lovely house with a wonderful partner. She’d had all the therapy. Then her beloved dog died. Her parents started to get sick right around the time she realized she was never going to be a mother herself. For the first time in her life, maintaining her ideal weight had become nearly impossible. She was supposed to grow up, but she didn’t know how. So instead she decided to regress, to go back to the thing she’d loved best as a child but had inexplicably abandoned: tennis. Thomas knows she’s not the only person to have wondered whether throwing enough money and time and passion at something can make your dream come true. 41–Love is heartbreaking but frequently funny as Thomas finds she’ll do anything to win—almost anything.

Oligarchy

A Novel

From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in—and be thin—at their all–girls boarding school

It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst.

The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits—featuring a hypnotizing black diamond—hang everywhere and whose ghost is said to haunt the dorms. It's said that she fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about one another. When Tash's friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the routines of the school seem darker and more alien than ever before. Tash must try to stay alive—and sane—while she uncovers what's really going on.

Darkly hilarious, Oligarchy is Heathers for the digital age, a Prep populated with the teenage children of the European elite, exploring youth, power, and affluence. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of these privileged young women, in all their triviality and magnitude, seeking acceptance and control in a manipulative world.