Prelude

“What a read! Every schoolboy’s dream comes true in this deftly-written treatment of illicit romance. A triumph.”—Alexander McCall Smith

“My own piano teacher was called Mr Bagston and frankly I don’t think any power on earth could have persuaded us to create a scene of the kind Coles so movingly describes.”—Boris Johnson, mayor of London and author of Have I Got Views for You

“An outstanding debut novel. A wonderful story of first love. Few male authors can write about romance in a way which appeals to women—but Coles has managed it quite brilliantly.”—Sunday Express (United Kingdom)

Seventeen-year-old Kim is a student at one of Britain’s most extraordinary institutions, Eton College—crammed with over a thousand boys and not a girl in sight. His head is full of the Falklands War and a possible army career, until the day he hears his new piano teacher, India, a beautiful but pained young woman, playing a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Kim’s life will never be the same again. An intensely passionate affair develops between him and his twenty-three-year-old teacher, and he wallows in the wild and unaccustomed thrill of first love. Twenty-five years on, Kim recalls that heady summer and how their fledgling relationship was so brutally snuffed out—finished off by his enemies, by the constraints of Eton, and by his own withering jealousy. Prelude is the bittersweet story of a life-changing love.

William Coles has been a journalist for eighteen years. He lives in the United Kingdom.