Rebecca Wait’s fourth novel Havoc has been announced by riverrun. Havoc will be published in July 2025. Publisher Jon Riley bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Caroline Hardman.

Havoc is a tragi-comic novel set in the 1980s at a crumbling girls’ boarding school, where a mysterious outbreak shakes up the lives of both pupils and teachers forever. ‘Fleeing Scotland in the wake of family disgrace, 16-year-old Ida Campbell secures a scholarship at a failing girls’ boarding school on a remote part of the south English coast. Geography teacher Eleanor Alston, in her forties, a disastrous love affair in her wake, faces the new term with weary resignation. But the fragile ecosystem of the school is disrupted by the arrival of a new teacher, Matthew Langfield. Eleanor has the uneasy feeling he is not who he says he is. More worryingly still, a mysterious sickness starts to spread throughout the school, causing limb jerks and seizures among her pupils. What is happening to the girls of St Anne’s? Could there be a poisoner among them?’

Jon Riley said: “Rebecca Wait is one of a kind. Her characters inhabit a hyper-humorous world in which the author’s wit and invention is compounded by her storytelling verve, making her novels intoxicatingly brilliant. It’s a joy to publish her.”

Rebecca Wait said: “I’m delighted to be working again with Jon, Jasmine, Elizabeth, Ana and the whole team at riverrun. I had a blast writing Havoc. I’ve been a teacher for twelve years, but have never worked in a school quite like this one. Thankfully.”

The Bookbrunch article can be read here