2025/065: Levitation for Beginners — Suzannah Dunn

2025/065: Levitation for Beginners — Suzannah Dunn

...surely anyone could see that this new girl was . . . well, what? I wanted to say she was a liar, although I couldn’t think of any actual lies she’d told. It was more that she was somehow all lies, I thought: made of lies; one big lie. [loc. 1399]

The setting is June 1972, somewhere in the south of England. Deborah (who's looking back from the vantage point of her sixties) is one of a close-knit group of girls in their last year of primary school. Deborah is the clever one: come September, she'll be going to grammar school while all the rest of them go to the local comprehensive. She has a secret crush on Tutankhamun, a widowed Scottish mother given to gnomic pronouncements ('the way to make me strong, she thought, was to make me scared') and a love of swimming.

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