COMP CLOSED: ‘The Shards’ by Bret Easton Ellis

This week’s giveaway book is a sensational new novel from Bret Easton Ellis – the bestselling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. The Shards tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city. His first novel in 12 years, this is Ellis at his inimitable best. Here’s a quick synopsis:

Los Angeles, 1981 – 17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.

Can he trust his friends – or his own mind – to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is a mesmerising fusing of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17 – sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.

If you’d like to win your own copy of this book, simply describe yourself at age 17 in 10 words or fewer! (It can be a sentence or just a string of words – your choice!) Our favourite three entries will win a copy!

Entries close midday Monday 23 January 2023, (Syd/Melb time).

THIS COMPETITION HAS NOW CLOSED. THANKS FOR YOUR ENTRIES! WINNERS WILL BE CONTACTED BY EMAIL AND ANNOUNCED IN OUR NEWSLETTER.