Prelude

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.


Genre: Romance

"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

"What a read!... A triumph." - Alexander McCall Smith