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Buy The Wildelings By Lisa Harding online from Woodbine Books – free delivery in ROI on orders over €50
A vivid and compulsive story of obsession, control and guilt, set in Nineties Dublin – perfect for fans of dark academia’Arrives to fill the Secret History-shaped hole in your lives … Gloriously entertaining’ Observer, Books to look out for in 2025’A searing exploration into our deepest desires and insecurities. I adored it’ Heather Darwent’I was gripped by this dark and thrilling fable’ Dominic West’I was hooked from the very start’ Rachel Joyce____________________________________________________________Jessica and Linda have been best friends since the first day of school. Both girls are from very different broken homes – and beautiful, wilful Jessica has always ensured their survival.Now eighteen, the two girls have come to Wilde – an elite university in the heart of Dublin, far away from their troubled childhoods. Jessica thrives immediately, and, with the faithful Linda at her side, finds herself at the heart of a new circle of friends.But then Mark enters the picture. A philosophy student a few years older than them, he has strange and compelling ideas about self-discovery. When Linda and Mark start dating, Jessica is disturbed by the change in her friend – and how quickly she seems to have fallen under this abrasive, charismatic man’s control.It turns out that Mark’s influence is not limited to Linda alone; and Jessica soon finds out that her whole group of friends are keeping secrets for him – culminating in a terrible tragedy that strikes at the end of their first year.Years later, Jessica is still grappling with her guilt over what happened at Wilde. And when Mark resurfaces, she knows she owes it to herself – and Linda – to set the record straight once and for all.
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With pitch-pure dialogue, and a plot that weaves in and around the theatre until the edges of reality blur, Lisa Harding presents us with a psychologically gripping story about personal manipulation and the imbalance of power in intimate relationships. A powerful performance
JANE URQUHART
Propulsive, with echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History … This is dark academia at its most gripping
ECONOMIST, The best novels published in the second quarter of 2025
Dark, blistering and full of theatrics, The Wildelings is an electric exploration of control, guilt, and one young woman’s fight to free herself. I was hooked from the very start
RACHEL JOYCE
Fans of dark academia or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this one’s for you
HARPER’S BAZAAR, The 25 Best Books Coming Out This Spring
Full of brooding menace … A dark and riveting novel
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
Harding gives Jessica a self-excoriating, incisive, bitter, and evocative first-person voice. The Wildelings' inexorable plot is like the proverbial train wreck: shocking, electric, impossible to turn from. Its psychological tumult verges on horror. With this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel, Harding offers pulsing intensity, gut-wrenching emotional upheaval, and high drama in every sense
SHELF AWARENESS
A story of obsession, control and guilt, set in 1990s Dublin … Perfect for fans of dark academia and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
IRISH TIMES
The Wildelings arrives to fill the Secret History-shaped hole in your lives … Gothic and gloriously entertaining
OBSERVER, Fiction to look out for in 2025 – Alex Preston
A searing exploration into our deepest desires and insecurities. I adored it
HEATHER DARWENT, author of the Sunday Times-bestselling The Things We Do to Our Friends
I was gripped by this dark and thrilling fable – Harding is the new Donna Tartt
DOMINIC WEST
Lisa Harding’s The Wildelings, in the tradition of dark academia, shocks with the cruelties of belonging, the seductive power wielded in friendships, the impulse to control and subjugate. Impeccably paced, dark and disturbingly honest, The Wildelings reveals campus life as theatre of cruelty; but the real stagecraft lies in Harding’s ability to excavate the still beating heart of a shared past and bonds beneath those brutalities. Riveting, addictive and, ultimately, beautifully human
UNA MANNION, author of Tell Me What I Am
Obsession, possessiveness, coercion, malice, spite, insecurity, frailty, vulnerability; lurking unease and the wax and wane of tenuous friendship. There’s a bundle of narrative thread to unravel here and Harding does it in a manner as unsettling as it is addictive
ALAN McMONAGLE
The Wildelings is, above all, a rich character study. Every relationship was created with so much care, and I found the novel enthralling, a haunting exploration of friendships and relationships gone sour
NB MAGAZINE
Praise for Lisa Harding: 'Absolutely dazzling
MARIAN KEYES
On every page there are little shimmering bombs
LISA TADDEO
Quietly devastating … Reminded me repeatedly of Shuggie Bain
OBSERVER
Stark and terrifying, fast-paced and intensely lucid
NEW YORK TIMES
A heady mixture of heartbreak and hope
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
A pungently propulsive heart-wrencher … An alarming yet tender portrayal of the slow-burn impact of long-repressed grief
DAILY MAIL
A novel of extraordinary intimacy and vividness, a uniquely disquieting account of a mind sinking into the depths and rising again, full of such powerful love and fear
MEGAN HUNTER
A tense, unflinching, immersive mapping of a pitted track of addiction and recovery … I lived every scene as I read, and I know that these characters will be with me for a long time
DONAL RYAN
[Harding's] writing is taut, and there is such an intensity, an urgency about the narrative that you find yourself turning the pages as if you fear Sonya might race out of sight … A contemporary, zeitgeisty read and very satisfying
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
