An Observer Best Debut of the Year

A Granta Best Young British Novelist

‘Mischievous and sexy’ SARAH WATERS

‘I loved this book’ JULIA ARMFIELD

‘Exhilarating’ MONICA HEISEY

'Astonishing' ANDREA LAWLOR

'Should be on everyone's summer reading list' iNEWS

'Scorching … One of our favourite reads' TIME OUT

A Guardian Essential Summer Read

A sensual debut novel of the forbidden love between a young woman and a headmaster’s wife, unfolding across a single heatwave summer.

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. There she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity.

Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into the older woman’s world with their unspoken desire blooming into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both know that a choice must finally be made.

‘Desire crackles through these pages like fire’ TELEGRAPH

‘Wildly sexy … I kept forgetting to exhale’ CHARLOTTE MENDELSON

‘There’s nothing else like it out there’ THE TIMES

'Compulsively readable … beautiful, brilliant' OBSERVER

‘Moody, generous and brilliant’ JESSIE BURTON

'Rare and thrilling' SARAH WINMAN