This Is an Actual Tragedy

Four friends. Four years. A game that will cost them everything. ‘Natalie Rose Richardson arrives with a vibrant, irreverent, singular voice’ Jonathan Safran Foer ‘If you've been to college in the past three decades, This is an Actual Tragedy will hit you like a madeleine dipped in LSD’ Tony Tulathimutte Fifty-five students gather to stage a performance. Some hope to make a statement. Others come for fun to play the game. Some carry supplies; wood and lighter fluid. Others wear tragic mouths and thousand-yard stares. They do not all agree on what it means. But all come in character; fully committed to the bit. When officers arrive at the scene, at first the students will cheer. When the shot is fired, four friends look up, at the sky. They are expecting to see a firework. ___________________________________________Darwin Harrington – hopeless physics geek, fingers stained orange with Doritos dust, afro overgrown – is about to start the University of Chicago’s inaugural ‘Scholars of Color’ programme.Here, he will meet the friends who will split and rearrange the atomic bonds of his life.After receiving a special invitation to join Scav, the university’s most secretive, nerdiest and notorious annual tradition, he finally has a shot at greatness.By fourth year, Darwin’s obsession drags all his friends into the game. Nat, an aspiring writer, joins for the story; Steph, the campus It Girl, joins for the rewards; Jordan, the golden boy, nicknamed ‘Young Barack’, joins to find redemption. Only three of the friends will survive. Some will call it a game. Others will call it an accident. Some will call it fate. All will call it a tragedy.