Testimony was published by Little, Brown in 2008. The inciting event is a videotape: three senior boys at a prestigious Vermont boarding school have had sex with a fourteen-year-old freshman girl after a party. The tape, made on a cell phone, is discovered by the headmaster’s wife. From this single piece of evidence, Shreve constructs a novel that radiates outward through the lives of everyone connected to the event — the boys, the girl, their parents, the headmaster, the teachers, the lawyers, the community.
The narrative structure is polyphonic: each chapter is told from a different perspective, in a different voice, and the accounts do not agree. Was the girl a willing participant or a victim? Were the boys predators or teenagers making a catastrophic mistake? Does the tape show what actually happened or only what the camera captured? Shreve refuses to arbitrate, presenting each version with equal authority and leaving the reader to weigh contradictory testimony — the courtroom metaphor of the title made literal.
The boarding school setting is precisely rendered — the privilege, the insularity, the assumption that consequences can be managed — and Shreve uses it to examine how institutional power protects some people and abandons others. The headmaster, Mike Bordwin, is the novel’s most complex figure: a man who has built his career on the school’s reputation and must decide whether to protect the institution or pursue justice, knowing that the two may be incompatible.
Collecting Testimony
First edition (Little, Brown, New York, 2008): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$20
- Very good/very good: $5–$10