At Freddie's

In 1963, the Temple is a crumbling jewel of a London stage school, run by its eccentric, old-fashioned principal Freddie Wentworth. As the school's finances dwindle and a businessman named Joey Blatt eyes a takeover, the two young teachers hired to cover the curriculum — the idealistic Hannah and the cynical Pierce — find themselves drawn into an affair that complicates their roles and the school's future. Told with the wry, understated wit for which Penelope Fitzgerald is known, the novel is a love letter to a vanishing world of theatre, where the lines between art, business, and personal devotion blur.