Weightless

About the Book

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015

Adamsville wasn’t a place that people came to. It was a place you were from, where you were born, where you were raised, where you stayed…

Before Carolyn Lessing arrived, nothing much had ever happened in Adamsville, Alabama. Each week, at dinner tables and in the high school assembly, everyone would pray for the football team to win. Each year, the Adams High hotlist would be updated, and girls would rise and fall within its ranks. Each day, everyone lived by the unwritten rules that cheerleaders did not hang out with the swim team, seniors did not date freshmen and the blistering heat was something that should never be remarked upon. But then the new girl came.

All Carolyn’s social media could reveal was that she had moved from New Jersey, she had 1075 friends – and she didn’t have a relationship status. In beach photos with boys who looked like Abercrombie models she seemed beautiful, but in real life she was so much more. She was perfect.

This was all before the camera crews arrived, before it became impossible to see where rumour ended and truth began, and before the Annual Adamsville Balloon Festival, when someone swore they saw the captain of the football team with his arm around Carolyn, and cracks began to appear in the dry earth.

About the Author :

Sarah Bannan, was born in 1978 in upstate New York. She moved frequently when she was growing up, living in Texas, in Florida and in Alabama, where she attended high school. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2000 and then moved to Ireland, where she has lived ever since. She has worked in various roles in the arts and, since 2007 she has been Head of Literature with the Arts Council. In 2010, she took part in the Faber Academy’s novel-writing course. Weightless is her first novel and has been shortlisted for the Newcomer of the Year in the Irish Book Awards.
@sarahkeegs

Review :
Riveting, agile and beautifully judged, this is one of those essential stories that will capture the imagination of different generations of readers. Sarah Bannan bears witness to the dark core of youth culture and yet manages to find meaning even in the anonymous corners. A superb debut novel A provocative and timely novel that unsettles the reader and challenges our view of contemporary youth. Its subject matter is universal; parents and children around the world will recognise the difficult and fractured society it depicts There is nothing new about bullying, but many of the weapons are new. Sarah Bannan brings us right into the middle of bullying, 21st Century-style, in a novel that is chilling, engrossing and very, very impressive Weightless focuses on cyberbullying with the arrival of a new girl at an Alabama high school If you need a fiction fix, Sarah Bannan’s Weightless is an engrossing and sophisticated literary thriller, inspired by modern daemons from cyber-bullying to our recklessness in giving away our privacy online This book was an uncomfortable read because although the plot is set in the South of America, it could happen anywhere – and sadly, it does A chillingly forensic account of school-girl bullying. It reminds me very much in style of The Virgin Suicides, and like that book is written in the first person plural which is no mean feat Bannan is smart on the way digital culture makes us voyeuristic consumers of other people’s experiences. But she also brilliantly skewers the false piety of America’s socially conservative communities, where chastity vows go cheek by jowl with teen promiscuity and where, from classroom to cheerleading squad, girls are the victims of a culture that relentlessly objectifies them Imagine cult ’80s high-school movie Heathers rewritten for the digital age. Set in a small Alabama town, Bannan’s brilliant debut novel charts the arrival of beautiful, academic new girl Carolyn at a tightly knit school … The sense of impending doom is almost unbearably tense – you won’t breathe out until you’ve finished the final page An accomplished debut that skewers youth culture with panache; it is a thought-provoking examination of the hypocrisy of smalltown life and a chilling vision of 21st-century bullying An unnamed group of girls recount the downfall of a beautiful newcomer in their class, in this chilling novel about the dark heart of high school From its origins in Greek drama to Eugenides’s masterful application and more recent novels, such as Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, the first-person plural voice can draw readers into a world and make them complicit in the deeds and misdeeds … An enduring image of weightlessness and momentary freedom, it shows the community in all its small-town glory, with the dangers and excitements of Carolyn’s arrival palpable It works brilliantly … It’s a compulsive, clever read, and leaves you thinking through the issues of bullying with new eyes A haunting, eye-opening tale of teenage bullying in the modern world. You’ll be thinking about it long after you close the final page **** Immensely effective ***** A gripping tale of adolescent bullying High school bullying has never been dealt with in as frightening a way, or one which examines quite as clearly the moral guilt of those who just stand by and watch ****