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Madeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport.

In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close enough to the Second World War to feel its aftershocks, but far enough to watch a new, disillusioned generation take shape; and writing queer desire as a woman.

The conversation also traces two key influences: Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys, with its atmosphere of postwar drift and compromised authority, and Mavis Gallant’s “Potter,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( ),” and “The Remission”—short stories about outsiders, social comedy, and lives shaped by prolonged waiting.