Soho Press: Prelude (ePub)

"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.


From the Hardcover edition.