What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

This was an interesting and well-written book, witty and with some good musings on female relationships (even though the "main" relationship in the story is between a 14 year old boy and his art teacher)

I didn't know Zoe Heller before but she is certainly a British author. You can just tell sometimes, when you are reading a British female author (even though I hate to make generalizations.

I whizzed through the book and thoroughly enjoyed it!

I found out that this book was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003!

Here's a bit from the Reading Group Guide:

At the center of the scandal is the obviously named Bathsheba Hart, a naïve pottery teacher at St. George's Academy in London. Mobbed by undisciplined teenagers and cowed by teachers' lounge politics, Sheba befriends a fifteen-year-old remedial student named Steven Connolly. At first she is drawn to him because he is one of the few students who does not terrorize her. He has a talent for drawing, and in several after-school sessions she encourages his artistic tendencies, exposing him to the work of Degas and Manet. Soon, however, their relationship leads to trysts behind the pottery kiln and secret rendezvous in Hampstead Heath.
Their affair and the ensuing media frenzy it ignites are recounted by Barbara Covett, a lonely history teacher who craves Sheba's friendship. Barbara is a catty narrator, disdainful of her students and suspicious of her colleagues, and her observations and petty critiques of her surroundings are feisty, witty and endlessly entertaining.