The Well-Tempered Clavier [Paperback]

'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

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.

This is my first novel and it's a love story: A 17-year-old schoolboy and his 23-year-old piano mistress - and I have set it at one of the strangest places that I have ever lived: Eton College.

If you're a boy at Eton, you don't quite appreciate that it might be a little bizarre for 1,300 boys to be all crammed into this school and with not a girl in sight.

It was only years after I'd left that I realised just how extraordinary the school was - to have the privilege of all these wonderful facilities, yet to be missing out on the company of girls.

Apart, though, from giving you a small slice of life at Eton, I've also tried to capture what it's like to fall in love for the first time.

What I especially remember was this glut of emotions that I'd never experienced before - the love, the lust and even, on occasion, the anger. And there was one thing more that I had not even begun to comprehend about love: The jealousy.

Most people are blown away by this intoxicating range of new emotions. And the jealousy, in particular, can be immensely destructive.

For my part, I remember finding my first girlfriend's diary, and how my emotions flip-flopped as I read it: On the one hand horrified with what I was doing, and on the other, thirsting to know more.

Later on, as I came to write this novel, I realised what a powerful force jealousy could be. It is my hero Kim's fatal flaw - for his first love comes with a past, and he has a lot of difficulty in dealing with that.

I've set the story in 1982, which was when I left Eton, and for me and most teenagers of the time it was an incredible summer - because this was the year of the Falklands War. It was the first time in our lives that our country had really gone to war, and now it's as if those grainy newspaper pictures have been etched into my memory.

One of the things that I'm always asked is if this is my story. Sadly - no. I'd love it if had been, as I can imagine nothing finer than to have been taken in hand by a stunning piano mistress.

No, I was told the story about 15 years ago, and I have been mulching on it ever since.

And one last thing: Why is this romance called The Well-Tempered Clavier? Well my wife, a former national newspaper editor, said I was absolutely insane to give the novel this title ... and she may well be proved right!

The title comes from a piece of piano music by J.S.Bach. It is the music which binds my two lovers together - and which now, even 25 years on, still has the ability to make Kim weep.

William has been a journalist for 18 years - which he thinks is probably the reason why he hates working in little pokey offices or libraries. Instead, he likes writing in coffee-bars and internet cafes with a wall of white noise and coffee on tap. Even though he s now written his first novel and plans to write many more, he still loves the tension and deadlines of journalism.