'Charming, moving, uplifting. Why can't all love stories be like this?' Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

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.

A bittersweet story of a life-changing love.

What Reviewers and Readers Say:

'This is a charming and uplifting book' Piers Morgan

What a read! Every schoolboy's dream comes true in this deftly-written treatment of illicit romance. A triumph' Alexander McCall Smith

'The Eton Affair 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 Eton Affair 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' USA popular literary blog

'The writing is such that regardless of how much appeal the