Prelude

A man looks back on his student days and an illicit, doomed romance with his piano teacher in this "triumph" of a novel (Alexander McCall Smith).

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. Now, a quarter-century later, 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.