Seventeen

‘Engaging and engrossing, frank and frankly troubling, Seventeen is a book not easily forgotten’ - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

‘A powerful tale of lost youth’ – Guardian

‘So compelling and shocking that to read it is to have it seared on to you. I felt like I was there. As gripping a memoir as you’ll find’ - David Whitehouse, author of About a Son

‘A truly impressive and important book’ – Ali Millar, author of The Last Days

‘A vivid and moving story, grippingly told’ – Alex Renton, author of Stiff Upper Lip

‘I was addicted to this book’ – Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father

‘Gripping […] a powerful read’ – Lucy Nichol, author of Parklife

It’s 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.  

For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing. 

Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at seventeen.