Rory Kinnear reads the Orange New Writer's Award Winner, Naomi Alderman's, second novel, 'The Lessons', a story of ambition, friendship, betrayal and desire. Today: Hilary Term, Mark's mother arrives bringing a present but no peace of mind for her increasingly erratic son.

Reader Rory Kinnear
Abridger Sally Marmion
Producer Di Speirs

The Lessons is the second novel from Naomi Alderman, winner of the Orange New Writer's Award and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Set among the dreaming spires of Oxford, it follows the progress of a gilded group of under-graduates drawn together by their dazzling and mercurial fellow student Mark Winters. Fuelled by his trust-fund and resident in his Georgian mansion, they live a charmed life of learning and parties and love-affairs. But university is no grounding for real life and none of the friends will be prepared, some years later, when tragedy strikes.

The Lessons is a novel about friendship, ambition, betrayal and desire, and the fact that only life can teach the lessons you really need to learn.

Naomi Alderman won the Orange New Writers Award for her first novel Disobedience and has subsequently been named as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She is a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford.

Rory Kinnear, fresh from playing Angelo at the Almeida and about to play Hamlet at the National Theatre studied at Balliol College, Oxford and reads his first Book at Bedtime. Show less