- Madam, by Phoebe Wynn. Quercus, $32.99.
British author Phoebe Wynn taught classics in the UK and English Language and Literature in Paris, before deciding to write full time.
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She has said that she loves British Gothic, particularly Jane Eyre, which she describes as "one of the great original gothic novels".
Wynn confesses she has a tendency, as an author, "towards the romantic, tragic and melodramatic".
She combines this with a love of the classics, the myths and legends associated with them, and the beliefs of a "solid feminist" in her remarkable debut novel, Madam.
Wynne sets Madam in 1992, a time before the dominance of the mobile phone and the internet.
Rose Christie, a 26-year-old raised by a feminist mother, arrives at Caldonbrae Hall, a boarding school for girls, in the remote Scottish highlands as the newly appointed Head of the Classics department.
She is the first new member of the teaching staff for over a decade.
Caldonbrae Hall is built at the end of a peninsula, "like an extraordinary grey wedding cake; halls and towers and rows of turrets added like great ornaments with outlines of flying buttresses to decorate".
The school was established in 1842 by Lord William Hope as a "dame school suitable for his six daughters, one of the first of its kind in Great Britain".
In 1992, the schools mission statement declares it will "support and guide our girls in becoming enlightened, fulfilled and resilient women, ready to serve and enrich the society to which they belong; and to honour our pioneering heritage through rigour and innovation, in the everlasting pursuit of excellence".
Rose is both excited and apprehensive of the challenges ahead but she soon discovers that all is not what it seems.
The school is gated and guarded; the girls, in their buttoned up white Victorian dresses with long hair plaited down their backs, are cold, vindictive and reluctant learners.
All of the other female staff, addressed as Madam, are old-girls and a troubled sixth former stalks Rose, accusing her of physical abuse while at the same time asking to be "saved".
In the classroom, however, through stories of courageous women from ancient Greek and Roman history, Rose persuades a small group of fourth formers to question the arcane traditions of the school, unknowingly raising the suspicions of the powerful and dangerous deputy head.
Madam is a dark, disturbing novel, which owes little to the traditional boarding school stories of Angela Brazil and Enid Blyton; rather think Picnic at Hanging Rock meets The Handmaids Tale, with undertones of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.
