TRUST EXERCISE

(Serpent’s Tail, £14.99, 272 pp ) IT’S THE Eighties and teenagers David and Sarah are students in love (and lust) at a prestigious U.S. performing arts school.

It’s an already febrile atmosphere, dense with a dangerous emotional intensity that Choi expertly conveys. Yet their iconoclastic and manipulative drama teacher seems intent only on stoking already inflamed passions.

By the time a troupe of visiting British students arrives you know it can’t end well, and it’s Sarah who bears the brunt of the fall-out. But Trust Exercise is literally a novel of two halves.

The second act, which takes places 20 years later, shifts the spotlight and calls into question all that has gone before.

If that sounds annoying, it isn’t — Choi might be tricksy, but she’s also deadly serious in her pursuit of timely, MeTooera themes including the misuse of power and the effects of abuse. Taut, distinctive and deeply unsettling.