The Four

In 1999, sixteen-year-old Rose arrives at High Realms, an elite boarding school in Devon, as one of four scholarship students. Outsiders in a world of inherited wealth and casual power, the four are shunned by most and singled out for cruelty by a privileged few. Bound together by their shared status and the daily grind of taunts, threats, and punishments, they forge a fierce loyalty that becomes their only defense.

But the relentless bullying was always going to end somewhere terrible. An accident leaves one student fighting for her life and another running for hers, and that single catastrophe becomes the fuse for a chain of events the four cannot control. As secrets accumulate and the school closes ranks, the bonds between them are tested to breaking, and a truth emerges that could save one of them or destroy them all.

Ellie Keel's Sunday Times bestselling debut is a tense, atmospheric dark-academia thriller. Steeped in class rage and the claustrophobia of an unforgiving institution, it is a story about friendship, cruelty, and the price of belonging.