"A firecracker of a novel... A pyrotechnic delight just as dazzling as The Bonfire of the Vanities" (Sunday Express)

"Brilliant... Not just a rollicking comedy of campus misbehaviour but a blistering indictment of contemporary standards" (Mail on Sunday)

"Exaggerates and deflates the pretensions of America's future ruling class in hilarious style" (The Economist)

"These are Wolfe's most memorable characters and this is his best book yet" (David Isaacson Word Magazine)

"Exuberant, lovingly crafted grotesquery" (Daily Telegraph)

Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite - her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, privileged Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavour on campus - she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. But little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.