In The Rules of Attraction Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College, a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan 80s. He treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the centre of their lives. Racing from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World, this is a poignant take on the death of romance. ‘Inspired. A wonderfully comic novel’ Gore Vidal ‘Compelling . . . sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his’ Vanity Fair ‘One of the primary inside sources in upper-middle-class America’s continuing investigation of what has happened to its children’ New York Times ‘Ellis has always been regarded as the bad boy of contemporary American letters’ Douglas Kennedy ‘A tour of the heart of darkness, a moral armageddon’ The Times