The Betrayals

This book is Hogwarts meets The Glass Bead Game meets The Handmaid's Tale. I was recommended it when I talked about my games book at a local bookshop. I must admit that I was initially very nervous about a book riffing on one of my favorite books of all time (The Glass Bead Game), but I really enjoyed it.

It is set in a school that trains students to play the game against a political backdrop that Margaret Atwood could easily have conjured up. It helped to give another perspective on Hesse’s fictional game that, as I said… show more.

I’ve loved Bridget Collins as an author since I read her debut YA book, The Traitor Game. Then came the great success of her first adult novel, The Binding, which made her a household name.

All her books show the same unbeatable knack for writing complicated, intense, and fully immersive relationships, and this book is no different.

It’s part dark academia, part twisted love story/rivalry, part exploration of the rise of fascism – all written with the author’s usual spellbinding prose and ability to conjure atmosphere, set in a world that’s a distorted mirror of our own.

As… show more.