Hallett builds novels out of documents, and this one is a mixed-media master’s course file: Six students, their emails, group chat, forum posts, submitted essays, and the tutor’s marking notes, all bundled and handed to an external examiner months after the course ended. The examiner’s job is to check the grades. What she finds instead is that the record doesn’t add up, and that one of the six may not have survived the term. There’s no narrator and no detective — you assemble it yourself out of what people wrote and what they conspicuously didn’t.
The Examiner