Public recounts a year in the life of five boys at a British boarding school. Charlie, recently crowned Head Boy of the prestigious Nevill Holt College, begins to fall in love with his reserved rival Harold. Their tender bond helps soothe a secret trauma, but entails the rejection of Charlie’s best friend Sprake. Subjected to cruel rituals, the junior boys struggle to fit in: Tom joins the choir and finds a protector in the sympathetic music master; while Giles, betrayed by his older brother, looks for comfort elsewhere. Amid the repression and conservatism of the public school system, Public is a brutal love story that explores very different kinds of love.

Public is an urgent study of adolescence in the British public boarding school: the site of privilege, power and wounded masculinity that defines our contemporary political institutions.

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