Shibboleth

Edward is a shy, quietly droll student at Oxford. Thanks to a quirk of his family history - a lone, dead grandparent from Zanzibar - he finds himself enthusiastically adopted by the wealthy, privately educated upper echelons of the student body. Several of Edward's fellow students are determined to remake him to suit their own prejudices and fixations: to Youssef he becomes a pious Muslim, to Angelica - and her African-American best friend, Liberty - he is reimagined as an expert in African history and champion of civil rights.  Despite Edward's new-found celebrity and 'exotic' appeal, he scrabbles to fit in with a crowd he rightly suspects will cast him aside the moment a more interesting specimen comes along.  Outside his hothouse circle of friends, a very different relationship is budding. A German-Jewish student named Rachel offers respite from the upper-class jostling of the others. But as the relationship flowers, Edward begins to feel both implicit and explicit pressure to reject her, at which point this essentially comic novel takes a dark and serious turn.