The Pact by Sharon Bolton

For six intelligent eighteen-year-olds just out of school, the world is a sensory paradise: sunshine, days on the river, festivals, lager, drugs. Most teenagers share some or all of these experiences, but Talitha, Daniel, Xavier, Amber and Felix are set apart from other young people by the immense social privilege they enjoy. As one of them points out, they are ‘not Plan B people.’ The world is their playground, so it is unimaginable that Plan A might not happen. Therefore, there is no need to consider the effects of their actions on other people. The outcome of this mindset is brilliantly explored in The Pact by Sharon Bolton. ‘They were the chosen ones, to whom the world belonged.’

The sixth member of the friendship group is different. Megan is the odd one out, accepted by the others only because she is Head Girl of their prestigious school, predicted to achieve stellar A-level results. It is significant that Megan, a scholarship girl whose mother is a single parent on a low income, is described as looking ‘more siren than mermaid’ in Talitha’s parents’ swimming pool. She carries a subtle threat to the group’s status quo even before their world is turned upside down.

Thrill-seeking during an idyllic summer, the group combine their expensively nurtured brainpower to dream up ‘the coolest dare imaginable.’ Some of them are reluctant to take part, but peer pressure ensures that everyone has to take their turn. When their fun goes horribly wrong and three innocent strangers die, Megan takes the blame. In return for her sacrifice, she demands a high price. After twenty years, she comes back to claim what she was promised, and the shiny worlds her former friends have built for themselves begin to crumble.

I enjoyed The Pact tremendously. It is the first of Sharon Bolton’s novels I have read, and I look forward to reading more of her work. All the characters are sensitively drawn and relatable, and I thought the end was original and convincing. It is a cliché to call a book a page turner, but I honestly felt compelled by the well-turned plot and fast pace of The Pact to keep on turning those pages.

There appears to be a subgenre of thrillers centred on university or gap-year friendships that turn sour, with a resentful outsider as the main character. I have read several with this basic premise, on which The Pact is an intriguing riff. It is interesting to compare The Pact with another excellent novel I have reviewed recently, The Favour by Laura Vaughan, which starts from a similar premise but spins off in a very different direction.