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.