Groomed for greatness, 15-year-old Jacob Hawthorne is sent to boarding school against his will. Jacob’s resentment toward his family reaches an all-time high when his father doesn’t bother to see him off for the 1980 school year. With a self-absorbed mother, an estranged father, and an older brother on the other side of the world, only the unlikely friendship with his grandfather can lure Jacob back home. But home feels like a distant memory from the shore of Raker Island, the isolated campus of one of the Northeast’s elite boarding schools.
As the surrogate bonds of a cloistered all-boys school fall into place, Jacob finds himself among other sons of privilege who suffer the same affliction—growing up in their fathers’ shadow. In fact, Jacob and his friends get dubbed “the Headliners” when their fathers make the headlines on the same day. Among them is Chris Forsythe, the rebellious son of a high-profile politician whose helicopter arrival sparks jealousy among the school’s upperclassmen.
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