Other editions of book Friendly Fire by Patrick Gale

At an elite English boarding school in the late 1970s, an orphaned fourteen-year-old girl falls in love with two boys—one of them gay—in this coming-of-age novel The town orphanage has been Sophie Cullen’s only home since she was five years old. She knows not whether her parents are living or dead, and has no memory of her life before Wakefield House. No one is more surprised than Sophie when she wins the last scholarship to an exclusive boarding school. Tatham’s was founded in the fourteenth century, and it is only the rare female scholar who gains entry. Even with the girls outnumbered twenty-five to one, Sophie only has eyes for upperclassman Lucas Behrman. Until she sees him kissing a boy. Then she meets Charlie Somborne-Abbot, whose life is shadowed by scandal. And solid, dependable Will Franks, who gives her her first kiss. But her education is just beginning. It will take a fall from grace and a devastating tragedy for Sophie to discover who she is and find her true place in the world. From the author of the bestselling Notes from an Exhibition, Friendly Fire is a wise and affecting chronicle of the painful angst of adolescence. A novel about friendship, family, and love, it explores the intransigence of beauty, the ephemerality of youth, the exhilaration of learning, and that most British of all preoccupations: class.

Youthful beauty, intellectual brilliance, physical passion, tragedy and disgrace are all in this wonderful new Patrick Gale novel as told through the eyes of a 14 year old girl. Sophie is a self-contained,exceptionally bright child who has no known parents and has spent all her life in a children's home.Her life is transformed when she wins a scholarship to Tatham's,a kind of Oxbridge university for teenagers,but this is only the start of an education as much emotional as intellectual. She falls hopelessly in love with Lucas, adored gay son of a wealthy Jewish family and, through him, is drawn into a tangle of betrayed friendship and forbidden passions that ends in tragedy and disgrace. But school is only half the story. Spanning the years 1975 to 1979 the chapters alternate between terms and holidays, between Sophie's dogged pursuit of the glittering prizes and her slow, painful discovery of who she is and where she belongs. Through other people's families, and especially other people's mothers, she learns as much about the mysterious laws of class and love as she learns from her teachers about the Latin and Greek that will prove her passport to security.