Schoolhouse

Isobel has built a quiet, tightly managed life in north London. She works at a library close to home and depends on fixed routines to keep her thoughts away from the past. That fragile balance is upset when a newspaper photograph of a local schoolgirl who has gone missing arrives alongside a letter from a former teacher, and the trauma of her years as a pupil at The Schoolhouse begins to resurface.

The Schoolhouse was one of the experimental schools of the 1970s, founded in reaction to rigid, traditional teaching. Its pupils lived without the usual rules, and daily life swung between liberty and excitement on one side and violence and dread on the other. Isobel left the school knowing that some truths are safest kept buried.

Her teenage diary is the only record of what happened there. Now the past is closing in, and everything she has worked to protect is at risk. The story moves between the past and the present.

The novel explores the distance between the truths we keep to ourselves and those we reveal, how silence can both shelter and imprison us, the misuse of power within institutions, and the way childhood lessons shape the adults we become.