Broken Toys

The novel follows Charlotte Cap and Esmé Polignac through their first two years at the fictional University of Montrose on the Scottish coast, from 2007 to 2009. Told through alternating first-person chapters, it charts an intense female friendship formed amid class anxiety, sexual violence, romantic obsession and the social cruelty of an elite university. Charlotte and Esmé initially appear to be opposites: Charlotte is a self-conscious, academically gifted working-class girl from Yorkshire, while Esmé is a wealthy, cosmopolitan Londoner whose French father and Italian mother have raised her among money, art, international travel and powerful men. Yet both arrive at university hoping to escape earlier versions of themselves, and both repeatedly seek freedom in situations that leave them less free than before.

Charlotte chooses Montrose partly because it feels like another world. She has recently ended her safe relationship with Sam, a reliable school boyfriend who loved her more than she loved him. Sam’s final message predicts that she will never be happy. Charlotte wants excitement rather than the careful, ordinary life represented by her parents, whose central romantic story involves her father driving for hours to rescue her mother when her car broke down.

On the first day of university, Charlotte sees Esmé across the crowd and becomes immediately fascinated. Esmé has a black bob, expensive but deliberately careless clothes and the absolute confidence of someone who assumes she will be noticed. Charlotte follows her and Sophie Nnadi, a wealthy and socially assured British-Nigerian student, from the freshers’ fair to the student bar. There they meet Jamie, Jann and a group of physically imposing older male students: Harry Arlington, Simon Adesina, Greg Brock, David Hadley and their charismatic leader, Adam Collingwood.