Julia May Jonas

Vladimir is narrated by a fifty-eight-year-old English professor whose husband is under investigation for relationships with former students, and who is meanwhile fixated on a younger male colleague.

Jonas taught and worked in theatre before writing, and the campus is drawn with an insider's precision about how a department handles a scandal it half agrees with.

The novel is deliberately uncomfortable about desire, ageing and complicity, and the narrator is not asking to be liked. It divided readers on exactly the grounds it was built to divide them.