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★授權英、美、波、瑞、俄，5國語文

In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend boarding school.

At eight years of age, Charles Spencer was sent away to one of England's most exclusive boarding schools. Here he reveals the strange secrets of the school, and the culture of cruelty and abuse he experienced in his five years there as pupil.

Spencer reflects on the misery, hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the vicious brutality of a boys' school in the 1970s. All these years later, Spencer's bafflement at the teachers' motivations to inflict such cruelty on young children in palpable. As is his fury that, even if somehow he had spoken up, he'd never have been believed.

A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account with important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of his schoolboy contemporaries and his own letters and diaries, Spencer explores the lasting impact of his experiences, presenting a candid reckoning with his past and a reclamation of his childhood.

 

Charles Spencer was educated at Eton College and obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a reporter on NBC’s Today show from 1986 until 1995, and is the author of four books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Blenheim: Battle for Europe (shortlisted for History Book of the Year, National Book Awards) and Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier.

 

「Top marks for its searing frankness, framed in wistfully beautiful prose.」－《The Times》

「Moving and beautifully written, what Spencer’s courageous book reveals will be horribly familiar to the thousands of us who endured the same vile abuse in dozens of schools that were clones of each other. Most of us will go to our graves with the wounds unhealed.」－Louis de Bernières, Sunday Times bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin

「A heartbreaking memoir of a childhood endured at a boarding school without love.」－《Financial Times》