Havoc

Wait's novel places a Scottish teenager, freshly disgraced and displaced, into a failing English girls' boarding school under the shadow of Cold War anxiety, and builds outward from psychogenic illness spreading among the students rather than any single antagonist. Reviewers have praised the restraint of the premise, this is a small, contained story rather than an epic one, and the tension comes from watching ordinary teenage cruelty and fear curdle into something closer to contagion. Some longtime readers of Wait's earlier fiction have found this outing more conventional than her past work, missing the sharper, odder voice that distinguished her previous novels, even as the plotting itself holds together well.