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.