In many ways, this feels like a more personal and a closer book to you than Lesson Zero. I thought it just would have been disingenuous to not call the character Brett Ellis. And so that's how it worked. For so much of the novel, I was writing a memoir, even though this is a novel. But it was also in many ways my memories of high school and my memories of the boys and the girls I knew."
Los Angeles, 1981. A group of beautiful, rich, high school students are playing adult in their absentee parents' empty mansions, fueled by lust and prescription drugs, and filled with fear and disaffection. This is the world of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in 13 years, part auto-fiction, part horror. The provocative and polarising author joins Alex Preston, award-winning author and journalist, to speak about the emptiness of adolescence, the lawlessness of the 80s, and how it feels to look back at it all aged 56 in 2023.
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