The Course of Instruction

When Alexander receives a cryptic letter inviting him to attend an unspecified course of instruction, he feels somehow compelled to go. From that moment on, his world will change, and all of his former certainties will be called into question. When he arrives at the institution in the small provincial town, no one is able - or willing - to tell him anything about the course, and life there seems slightly out of focus and eerily ambiguous. As Alexander struggles to understand the strange situation in which he has landed, he gradually finds himself in a bizarre and surreal nightmare from which there may be no escape ...

The follow-up to David Wheldon's (1950-2021) award-winning cult classic The Viaduct (1983), The Course of Instruction (1984) is a haunting and compelling novel in the vein of Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, and Samuel Beckett. This new edition includes an introduction by Aiden O'Reilly.

"Like a Kafka novel, it takes place in a world which superficially resembles our own but is terrifyingly different." - Sunday Telegraph

"While this, his second novel, will, like his first, recall such writers as Kafka and Rex Warner, its intelligence and rigour are all his own." - Deborah Philips, City Limits

"Wheldon's writing is precise and chilly, the authoritative hand in the small of the back pushing one further down the corridor and into the dark ... a convincing, disturbing read." - New Statesman

"Has the compelling interest of any story with a mystery ... memorable surrealist scenes ... strongly recommended." - Sunday Telegraph

"A stark, disorienting work." - The Times