“Sensitive and perceptive…Writing primarily from Ben’s point of view, Tilney also alights for a sentence or two at a time in the minds of those who surround him, which adds depth to the narrative.”

—Margaret Quamme, Booklist

“Along with deep-rooted misogyny and archaic traditions, elite boarding schools also come with a wealth gap where popularity is defined by money and esteemed surnames. Tilney examines these socioeconomic issues in The Expectations…Ben and his Dubai-born roommate Ahmed navigate the complex and fluid nature of teenage social life in a space dominated by blue bloods.”

—Frances Yackel, Electric Literature

“Ben Weeks has just arrived at St. James, the exclusive boarding school his ancestors helped found (it doesn’t hurt that his brother, an alum, was a social legend). Ben’s roommate is Ahmed, son of a rich Emirati sheik, who’s trying to navigate the ins and outs of New England school life.”

—Mackenzie Dawson, New York Post (Best Books of the Week)

“An evocative portrayal of an almost hermetically sealed universe and a cannily oblique meditation on the wider world…Ben and Ahmed make a perfect dramatic duo for the book: they help each other, they hurt each other, and they serve as a painful mirror for the other’s flaws.”

—Peter C. Baker, The National (UAE)

“Smart, shrewdly observed, and highly readable…Debut author Tilney deftly limns the unchanging eponymous expectations: that students will graduate to the Ivy League and real-world leadership; that while at St. James they will uphold such dubious traditions as ferocious competitiveness in sports and brutal hazing of new students. But Tilney also nails the changing social climate of the mid-1990s…The novel paints a compassionate portrait of a confused young man groping for maturity.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Beautifully rendered, sharply observed, and intensely moving. Writing with uncommon acuity and generosity, Tilney pierces the heart of a boy, exposing it without betraying it. The Expectations is an unsentimental novel about adolescence, written for adults, to be read not so that we might remember our blundering younger selves but that we might forgive them. A gift of a novel.”

—Susan Rieger, author of The Heirs

“A stunning coming-of-age portrait that captures a young man’s struggle for acceptance and family, and his need to figure out who he wants to be…Tilney’s descriptions of the fraught relationships between player and coach, advisor and student, are spot on…Read this book to be caught up, again, in those teenage years of impossible decisions.”

—Rachel Barenbaum, Dead Darlings

“Rewarding…Tilney’s memorable boarding school novel hits the mark…The author effectively touches on matters of class, societal pressures, and what it really means to be cool.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Tilney applies supple, panoramic prose to this fictious-but-actually-based-on-a-real northeastern prep school. It is a super book.”

—Pam Stack, Authors on the Air

Also available from
Back Bay Books

The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler