Hoping someone can help me--I'm going crazy trying to remember the name of this book. Here is everything I remember: Plot: The narrator is a guy. He's a teacher. He refers to his time teaching, meaning he no longer teaches at the time of the story. There is a colleague named Deb. She's gay, though he doesn't know that until later in the book. I believe his girlfriend's name is Annie. He has another colleague, an older man, who always asks him for a cigarette. The colleague becomes a mentor to him. Later in the book, the colleague gets ill so the narrator goes to his house once a week to tend to his foot. The headmaster at the school is a woman. Quite formal I believe. I have no recollection of how it ends or really anything substantial plot-wise. Just that this guy was teaching at what I believe was a private academy, we get to know his colleagues a bit, and...that's it. It's making me batty not remembering this book. Someone PLEASE help out if you know it. Many thanks in advance. Happy reading!!
A brilliantly observed prep school novel about fraught teacher-student relationships—and about coming into adulthood.Ben Jameson begins his teaching career in a small private school in Northern Virginia. He is idealistic, happy to have his first job after graduate school, and hoping some day to figure out what he really wants out of life. And in his two years teaching Engl A brilliantly observed prep school novel about fraught teacher-student relationships—and about coming into adulthood.Ben Jameson begins his teaching career in a small private school in Northern Virginia. He is idealistic, happy to have his first job after graduate school, and hoping some day to figure out what he really wants out of life. And in his two years teaching English at Glenn Acres Preparatory School, he comes to believe this really is his life's work, his calling. He wants to change lives.But his desire to "save" his students leads him into complicated territory, as he becomes more and more deeply involved with three students in particular: an abused boy, a mute and damaged girl, and a dangerous eighteen-year-old who has come back to school for one more chance to graduate. In the Fall They Come Back is a book about human relationships, as played out in that most fraught of settings, a school. But it is not only a book about teaching. It is about the limits and complexities of even our most benevolent urges—what we can give to others and how we lose ourselves. ...more