Home School

THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO CHARLES WEBB'S INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND MAJOR MOVIE - THE GRADUATE

It offers a witty and bitingly accurate tale of suburban frustration whose slightness is integral to its charm.

Charles Webb's sequel to THE GRADUATE sparkles with as much wit 
and invention as the original. Throughout the book, everything - dialogue, characterisation, even incident - is pared down to a minimum, and yet the result, far from being undernourished, hums with richness and vitality. So here's to you Mrs Robinson, and to Charles Webb for doing such a fine job of resurrecting her.

Distinctive, wry, spare and beautifully modulated

Forty years overdue, the sequel to The Graduate was worth the wait. A great read.

By utilising the same wry humour and pinpoint characterisation of the first novel, and by delving even further into the dark motives of the iconic Mrs Robinson, Webb has made this continuation of a classic believable and entertaining.

Mrs Robinson's predictably sordid involvement has predictably horrendous results and Webb wittily captures a claustrophobic family home.

A delight from a master of acutely observed social comedy.

Charles Webb was born in California. His first novel, The Graduate, was made into the acclaimed film. Six years ago he moved to the UK to write a novel based on a English character, which was published as New Cardiff. He and his wife Fred remained in Great Britain. 
 
Currently he is working on a novel entitled Porn Flakes, about a poet who inherits an adult book shop.

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California. 
 
It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home. 
 
Through no accident, a continent now stands between them and the boys' surviving grandparent, now known as Nan, but who in former days answered to Mrs. Robinson. As the story opens, the Braddock household is in turmoil as the Westchester School Board attempts to quash the unconventional educational methods the family is practising. 
 
Desperate situations call for desperate remedies - even a cry for help to the mother-in-law from hell. She is only too happy to provide her loving services - but at a price far higher than could be expected. 
 
Charles Webb has a knack for pinpointing the horrors and absurdities of domestic life, and Home School displays all the precision and wit that made The Graduate such a long-lasting success..

The Graduate

Charles Webb was born in 1939 in San Francisco. He was educated at Williams College, Massachusetts, where he graduated in American history and literature. The Graduate was his first novel, and was made in to a hugely successful film. His other novels include Love, Roger, The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (also filmed), The Abolitionist of Clark Gable Place and Elsinor.

'For twenty- one years I have been shuffling back and forth between classrooms and libraries. Now you tell me what the hell it's got me.' That's how Benjamin Braddock talked when he came down from university. Somehow it didn't seem to be what his father expected from a college education, and everyone was really appalled when Ben raped Mrs Robinson (that was her story anyway) and ran off with her daughter in the middle of her wedding to someone else... a brilliantly sordid tale of a young man's search for identity and a portrayal of the worst-behaved yet most sympathetic anti-hero of the day.

Charles Webb

Hanif Kureishi

As far as Benjamin Braddock's parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a good job and enjoy a life of money, cocktails and pool parties in the suburbs, just like them. For Benjamin, however, this isn't quite enough. When his parents' friend Mrs Robinson, a formidable older woman, strips naked in front of him and they begin an affair, it seems he might have found a way out. That is, until her daughter Elaine comes into the picture, and things get far more complicated.

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He writes with this lovely, spare style

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