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Monday 20 February 2012

Noughties by Ben Masters

A University Drinking Challenge?
review by Maryom


Eliot Lamb and his friends are about to leave university. How well will the past 3 years at Oxford have fitted them for life in the 'real' world? For tonight no one cares - they're out for one last evening - drinking their way from pub, then on to the bar and lastly the club. As they wander, increasingly drunk, round town, Eliot reminisces about his time in Oxford and fends off increasingly urgent texts and missed calls from ex-girlfriend Lucy.

Eliot isn't the most likeable of characters and as the story is told by him I think this tainted my attitude towards it. Self-centred and shallow, he feels superior to just about everyone he meets - to his old school friends because he's gained a place at Oxford while they're off to 'common' universities; to the public schoolboys at Oxford because he had to earn his place. He seems to have stumbled blindly around for the past three years, blissfully unaware of the crises affecting his supposedly best friends.

I came away from this book thinking "well, I didn't enjoy that much" but in the week or so since then, as I've gone on and read other things, my opinion of it has gone up.

Not a book I'd recommend to any parents with children at, or about to start, university - you'd probably decide to keep them at home under a watchful eye!

Publisher - Penguin
Genre - Adult Fiction


Buy Noughties from Amazon

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