From Publishers Weekly
Subtitled Notes on a Scandal, Heller's engrossing second novel (after Everything You Know) is actually the story of two inappropriate obsessions-one a consummated affair between a high school teacher and her student, the other a secret passion harbored by a dowdy spinster. Sheba Hart, a new 40ish art teacher at a London school for working-class kids, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly. The papers are having a blast. Sheba is herself the object of fascination for her older colleague and defender, Barbara Covett, whose interest in Sheba is not overtly romantic but has an erotic-and at times malevolent-intensity. Barbara narrates the story of Sheba's affair while inadvertently revealing her own obsession and her pivotal role in the scandal. The novel is gripping from start to finish; Heller brings vivid, nuanced characterizations to the racy story. Sheba is upper-class, arty, carelessly beautiful in floaty layers of clothing, with a full life of her own: doting older husband, impossible adolescent daughter, a son with Down's Syndrome, real if underdeveloped talent as a potter. She never got a driver's license, she tells Barbara, because she is always given rides; people want to do things for her. Barbara's respectable maiden-lady exterior hides a bitter soul that feasts on others' real and imagined shortcomings: one colleague's carelessly shaved armpits, another's risible baseball jacket. Even characters on stage for a minute (a Camden barman who hams it up for Barbara) live and breathe.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Heller's insightful, piercing second novel (her first was Everything You Know [2000]) is narrated by Barbara Covett, a lonely older woman who purports to tell the story of her friend's downfall. When Sheba Hart arrives to be the new art teacher at the school where Barbara teaches history, solitary Barbara is immediately taken with her. Though her initial attempt to befriend Sheba is thwarted when Sheba becomes friends with another teacher, eventually Sheba begins to converse with Barbara. Soon, she invites Barbara over to her house to have meals with her family. Barbara is shocked to learn that Sheba is being pursued by a 15-year-old student and scandalized to find that Sheba has given in to his romantic overtures. But for solitary Barbara, her friend's scandalous life^B is a window to a more exciting one, and vicariously she laps up the bits and pieces Sheba shares, imagining or surmising the rest. The novel builds to a stunning ending that ultimately reveals Barbara's true character as much as it shows the depths to which Sheba has fallen. Both a penetrating character study and a sharp examination of voyeurism, Heller's novel is utterly brilliant. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“An inspired tale of two women, one seen through the other’s eyes, with the viewer revealing more of herself than she ever suspects. From the first sentence to the last, the story and the writing of it have a thrilling intensity that holds the reader’s rapt attention.” —Paula Fox

“The most gripping novel of the year. You leave this extraordinary book utterly shaken, with new knowledge of the human heart. Heller writes with a precision that stirs the blood and an uncommon insight into the darker sides of love.” —Nuala O’Faolain



Book Description
A lonely schoolteacher reveals more than she intends when she records the story of her best friend’s affair with a pupil in this sly, insightful novel

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary existence; aside from her cat, Portia, she has few friends and no intimates. When Sheba Hart joins St. George’s as the new art teacher, Barbara senses the possibility of a new friendship. It begins with lunches and continues with regular invitations to meals with Sheba’s seemingly close-knit family. But as Barbara and Sheba’s relationship develops, another does as well: Sheba has begun a passionate affair with an underage male student. When it comes to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her freind’s defense—an account that reveals not only Sheba’s secrets but her own.

What Was She Thinking? is a story of repression and passion, envy and complacence, friendship and loneliness. A complex psychological portrait framed as a wicked satire, it is by turns funny, poignant, and sinister. With it, Zoë Heller surpasses the promise of her critically acclaimed first novel, Everything You Know.



About the Author
Zoë Heller was born in London. Her work as a feature writer, critic, and columnist has appeared in The Independent on Sunday, The London Sunday Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The London Review of Books, Esquire, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement. She currently writes a weekly column for the London Telegraph, for which she won the 2002 British Press Award for Columnist of the Year. She has lived in New York since 1993.



Excerpted from What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From What Was She Thinking?:

This is chief among the reasons why I have now decided to risk further calumny by writing my own account of Sheba’s downfall. I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am the person best qualified to write this small history. I would go so far as to hazard that I am the only person. Sheba and I have spent countless hours together over the last eighteen months, exchanging confidences of every kind. Certainly, there is no other friend or relative of Sheba’s who has been so intimately involved in the day-to-day business of her affair with Connolly. In many cases, the events I describe here were witnessed by me personally. Elsewhere, I rely upon detailed accounts provided by Sheba herself. I am not so foolhardy as to claim for myself an infallible or complete version of the story. But I do believe that my narrative will go some substantial way to helping the public understand who Sheba Hart really is.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
More than a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wowed readers with The Remains of the Day, a novel requiring readers to see past the self-deceptions of an uppity English narrator to understand the true significance of the story. In the same vein, Zo￯﾿ﾽ Heller offers a riveting story of friendship, jealousy, and betrayal, with a narrator as unreliable as Ishiguro's infamous butler.

Heller's narrator is Barbara Covett, a British schoolteacher who lives a quiet, solitary life with an aging cat as her sole companion. For reasons she cannot comprehend, Barbara has never been good at making friends. But she is drawn to Sheba, a pretty new pottery teacher, and jealously tries to edge out the other teachers to win Sheba's friendship. When Sheba begins an inappropriate relationship with a young male student, it is Barbara in whom she confides. Soon, Barbara begins a written account of Sheba's illicit affair, detailing the actions of a woman caught in the grip of an obsession larger than herself.

As Barbara continues to infiltrate Sheba's life, their friendship acquires a dangerous undercurrent. And although the book title ostensibly refers to Sheba, readers might ask themselves the same question of Barbara, as this psychologically rich, complex tale unfolds. In penning her wickedly wonderful second novel, Zo￯﾿ﾽ Heller certainly had her head squarely on her shoulders. (Fall 2003 Selection)

ANNOTATION

Second Place Winner, 2003 Discover Award, Fiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary existence; aside from her cat, Portia, she has few friends and no intimates. When Sheba Hart joins St. George's as the new art teacher, Barbara senses the possibility of a new friendship. It begins with lunches and continues with regular invitations to meals with Sheba's seemingly close-knit family. But as Barbara and Sheba's relationship develops, another does as well: Sheba has begun a passionate affair with an underage male student. When it comes to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her freind's defense--an account that reveals not only Sheba's secrets but her own.

What Was She Thinking? is a story of repression and passion, envy and complacence, friendship and loneliness. A complex psychological portrait framed as a wicked satire, it is by turns funny, poignant, and sinister. With it, Zoë Heller surpasses the promise of her critically acclaimed first novel, Everything You Know.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

In the end, What Was She Thinking? isn't so much about the standard student-teacher affair as it is about the complicated weights and balances of female friendships. Some of the novel's funniest scenes show the women adopting a posture of honesty and ''supportiveness'' while privately judging or dismissing one another. It's a recognizable snit-fit of ''enough about you, what about me'' that pushes Barbara into her final betrayal. In a way, Barbara risks more for friendship than Sheba does for romance. The plot twist may not be a huge surprise, but Heller handles it with wry grace, managing to mock her characters without allowing their story to tip into farce. — Lisa Zeidner

The Los Angeles Times

What Was She Thinking? is a tartly readable portrait of terminal neediness, as sharp and merciless as any of Zo￯﾿ﾽ Heller's columns. — Heller McAlpin

The Washington Post

In literature as in life, one of the most dangerous turns of events is to get what you want, and for all its surface tawdriness and chatty asides, What Was She Thinking? achieves some worthy literary aims indeed. — Chris Lehmann

The New Yorker

Barbara Covett, a sixtyish history teacher, is the kind of unmarried-woman-with-cat whose female friends sooner or later decide she is "too intense." Thus when a beautiful new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart -- a "wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts" - chooses Barbara as a confidante, she is deeply, even rather sinisterly, gratified. Sheba's secret is explosive: married with two kids, she is having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The novel, Heller's second, is Barbara's supposedly objective "history" of the affair and its eventual discovery, written furtively while she and her friend are holed up in a borrowed house, waiting for Sheba's court date. Barbara has appointed herself Sheba's "unofficial guardian," protecting her from the salivating tabloids. Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company.

Publishers Weekly