Kat McAdaragh

How a Cambridge graduate transformed a single summer’s day into a masterpiece of adolescent truth

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In the landscape of contemporary literary fiction, few debut novels manage to capture the delicate intersection of grief, adolescence, and the weight of a single day quite like Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under. This debut has been making waves in literary circles, earning praise from critics and readers alike for its exquisite prose and unflinching portrayal of teenage life in 1980s England.

About Alice

Alice Chadwick studied English at Cambridge and was a student on City Lit’s selective fiction Masterclass. She grew up in a small town in Britain in the 1980s, a place she returns to in her fiction, and currently lives in East London. Her non-fiction has been included in anthologies of London writing, but Dark Like Under marks her entrance into the literary world as a novelist—and what an entrance it is.

The Novel That Captivated

Dark Like Under unfolds over a single hot summer’s day in an English school in the 1980s following the aftermath of the death of a beloved teacher, Mr. Ardennes. While students and teachers struggle with this sudden loss, normal life continues—lessons, flirtations, arguments. At the heart of it all is Tin, burning bright with defiance, feared and adored in equal measure, and potentially betrayed by best friend Robin and boyfriend Jonah.

Set against a backdrop of strikes and economic unrest, the novel is sun-soaked and a rural beauty. It captures the promise and risk of late adolescence and serves as an exploration of friendship, loneliness, and grief.

Critical Acclaim

The literary community has embraced Chadwick’s debut with remarkable enthusiasm. Critics have praised it as having “subtle, almost transcendent grace” with “delicate, precise and not without a little humour” prose, calling it “full of breathtaking passages” and “a quiet, understated book but one of bottled magic.”

The Guardian noted that “Dark Like Under is impressively subtle, sensual and sympathetic,” while The Observer praised Chadwick as “adept at finding the lesser tragedies bursting at the seams, amounting to a clever and compassionate debut.” The Irish Times called it “a strange, unsettling, but rather brilliant novel.”

The Irish Times particularly highlighted Chadwick’s ability to offer “insights into the politics of school life,” noting how she “excels at describing how teenagers are convinced that even their smallest interactions are of global importance.”

What Makes Her Writing Special

What sets Chadwick apart is her ability to compress the vastness of human experience into the container of a single day. Her descriptive powers have been called “remarkable” with “wonderfully accurate” period details, but critics note she’s “not just good at surfaces”—she’s “also capable of brilliant characterization.”

One reader describes the experience: “The story takes place on one long hot summer’s day in which Chadwick’s juxtaposition of a peaceful pretty rural town and its claustrophobic dark undercurrents is masterful. You can really feel the teenage angst.”

A Voice for Our Time

In an era where coming-of-age stories often feel formulaic, Chadwick brings fresh authenticity to the genre. Her intimate understanding of the 1980s setting—drawn from her own childhood in small-town Britain—infuses the narrative with genuine period detail and emotional truth.

The novel has been described as “thrumming with life” and offering “a profound exploration of friendship, loneliness and grief” that resonates far beyond its specific time and place.

A Writer to Remember

Alice Chadwick represents the kind of literary voice we need more of—one that understands that the most profound human dramas often unfold in the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life. Her ability to find the extraordinary within the ordinary, particularly in the complex emotional landscape of adolescence, marks her as a writer to watch.

Dark Like Under is more than just a successful debut; it’s an announcement that Chadwick possesses the rare gift of transforming the specific into the universal, making readers feel the weight of a single day in a way that illuminates the entirety of the human experience.

As critics have noted, this is an author whose future work is eagerly anticipated. In Alice Chadwick, we have found a writer who understands that sometimes the most important stories happen not over lifetimes, but in the space between morning and evening, in the heat of a summer day when everything changes and nothing will ever be quite the same again.