num_pages: 304
description: When Kate Quaile meets Max Rippon in the first week of university a life-changing friendship begins. Over the next four years the two become inseparable. For him she breaks her solitude; for her he leaves his busy circles behind. But knowing Max means knowing his family: the wealthy Rippons all generosity social ease and quiet repression. Theirs is a very different world from Kates own upbringing and yet she finds herself quickly drawn into their gilded lives and the secrets that lie beneath. Until one evening at the Rippons home just after graduation her life is shattered apart in a bedroom while a party goes on downstairs. What Red Was is an incisive and mesmerizing novel about power privilege and consent--one that fearlessly explores the effects of trauma on the mind and body of a young woman the tyrannies of memory the sacrifices involved in staying silent and the courage in speaking out. And when Kate does it raises this urgent question: whose story is it now?
language: None
title: What Red Was
publisher: Harvill Secker