The Well-tempered Clavier

Seventeen-year-old schoolboy Kim is an idle drifter 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, the beautiful but pained India, playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Kim’s life is destined never to be the same again. An intensely passionate affair develops 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. “The Well-Tempered Clavier” is the bittersweet story of a life-changing love.

Reviews of The Well-tempered Clavier

This is a charming and uplifting book. Piers Morgan Charming, moving, uplifting. Why can't all love stories be like this? Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal Elegantly structured, tinglingly evocative of the passion and brutality of first love – a wonderful read. Louise Candlish What a read! Every schoolboy's dream comes true in this deftly-written treatment of illicit romance. A triumph Alexander McCall Smith The Well-Tempered Clavier is a beautiful book, managing to use a simple narrative voice without consequently bland style – honesty, beauty, and passion pervade the novel but so do humour, youthfulness and energy. Stuck in a Book The Well-Tempered Clavier is 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 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 Passionate and excruciatingly compelling Curledup The writing is such that regardless of how much appeal the setting of Eton should have for all the Anglophiles out there, the delicate and deliberate prose will be what ensures the devotion of the reader until the very last page Alcott and Earhart a brilliantly plotted and paced evocation of an affair between a 17-year-old schoolboy and his 23-year-old piano teacher in Eton in the spring of 1982, the Falklands war rumbling in the background. The Oldie It encompasses all the emotions of being in love, but also of lust, envy, and worries for the future; this is certainly one to read again. Student Direct