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'The Dupont campus…The towers, the turrets, the spires, the heavy slate rooves…all of it was ineffably beautiful and ineffably grand. I'm a Dupont man' he said to himself. Where was the writer who would immortalize that feeling?

(Hoyt Thorpe, Saint Ray Frat member, Mr Popular on campus)

Dormcest, sexciling, jocks, mutants and frostitutes…welcome to the life and lingo of America's elite, the manicured lawns and roseate Gothic spires of Dupont University. Dupont has it all - tradition, the cream of America's youth, the outward manifestation of all that is bright and beautiful in the grand old U S of A. Or so it appears to the very beautiful and very brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (population: 900) who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer swilling high-school classmates. But to her dismay, Charlotte soon learns that the beautiful people of Dupont are no different from their impoverished equivalents at Sparta high-school. At least in life's fundamentals, that is.

Along the way, Charlotte encounters (and in some cases gets intimate with) a colourful cross-section of Dupont's elite. Her first encounter is with Beverly, her rich, fleshy roommate, who lives to socialize and to gratify her over-inflated sex-drive. In close succession Charlotte meets JoJo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team; the sexy Saint Ray frat member, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social dominion is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millenial Mutants who run the university's newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavour on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus. As the novel heats up, Charlotte is caught-up in the cross-fire between Adam Gellin's intellectual crew- who aspire to preserve Dupont's intellectual prestige - and the sexy, sporting superstars of the campus such as JoJo Johansen whose university place rests on their sporting, not academic prowess and their ability to sweet-talk a few professors into maintaining their grades.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives…

'Our finest commentator on modern American society'
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'The white-suited, twinkle-eyed purveyor of wicked social observation'
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'Tom Wolfe, with his bright architectural eye, writes so well about institutions that he
forces you to compare him with his beloved Dickens'
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