Angels at the Gate
Regal House Titles- Current Stock:
- 0
- SKU:
- AATG25
At remote Rockhaven University, the shocking death of student Brantley Simms beneath the bell tower shatters the campus, a place that once felt safeguarded by local angels. A year later, Leah Gavin, who knew Brantley under strained circumstances, becomes study partners with his former roommate from a rival fraternity and begins to unravel the mystery surrounding Brantley’s death.
Her questions lead her back to Brantley’s fraternity and her own closest friends, and from there into secret societies and the darker side of her beloved college. As Leah develops feelings for one boy, she finds herself entangled in a complicated relationship with another, who harbors his own suspicions about the tragedy. Caught between two people she cares for—three if she includes the one who is gone—Leah must confront the unsettling truths she discovers while continuing to navigate her own precarious life as a student.
Angels at the Gate offers a poignant exploration of college life to the beat of a 1980s mixtape, set in an unusually insular environment permeated by misogyny and sexual repression.
Praise for Angels at the Gate
“Sheri Joseph’s mesmerizing Angels at the Gate is more than a campus novel, more than a mystery, more than a reflection on memory. It’s a deeply-felt story of a young student, Leah, and her friends and classmates, as they begin to create the person they will become, and the choices they make that forever remind them of what they left behind. It’s heartbreaking, joyful, and utterly unforgettable.”
—Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang
“Sheri Joseph plunges readers into the shadowy fog of tradition-bound Rockhaven University, where secrets, secret desires, and questions of loyalty swirl around cool girl Leah and her friend group of frat boys. With an unerring eye for the complex dynamics of pre-social media campus life, Joseph elegantly captures the 80s, complete with a to-die-for playlist. Compulsively readable and deliciously dark.”
—Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to Noone and Silver Girl
“In the tradition of The Secret History and The Group, Angels at the Gate reinvents the genre of the campus mystery. Leah, inexperienced in both romantic relationships and the privileged world of private colleges, seeks to unravel the mystery of a fellow student’s apparent suicide, perhaps in an attempt to find answers to her own mother’s suspicious death. Through breathtaking descriptions and witty dialogue, Joseph deftly and convincingly creates the rarified atmosphere of the newly co-ed Southern college on the hill, whose traditions, mores, and secrets remain opaque to Leah, even as she believes that her intellectual capacity allows her understanding. As the danger of the mystery increases, involving secret societies and unrequited longings, Leah realizes that the victim—like Leah herself—like all of us—onged most for unobtainable connection and intimacy. Through Joseph’s evocative prose and adept characterizations, this gorgeous novel reminds us, once again, how our earliest relationships may suggest our paths, but our vulnerable early adult years cement our futures.”
—Allison Amend, author of Enchanted Islands and A Nearly Perfect Copy
“If you love a campus novel—and who doesn’t?—meet Leah, your tour guide through a beguiling mystery set among the lamplit paths and leafy towers of a college as vivid and tinged with melancholy as the one in your memory. Cuskian in the sharpness of its observations of friends, family, and frenemies, Angels at the Gate exerts a subtle and haunting power.”
—Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men