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.