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A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed

A group of privileged teenagers at Buckley School, Los Angeles medicate themselves on champagne, cocaine and mindless sex – until something awful happens

28 January 2023

9:00 AM

28 January 2023

9:00 AM

The Shards Bret Easton Ellis

Swift Press, pp.608, 25

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it: a book with little plot but with so much life.

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