Seventeen

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 for seventeen years. 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.

About the Author

Joe Gibson is a star of West End musicals, a concert pianist, ballet dancer, Formula 1 racing driver, and embarking on his PhD, in his dreams. In real life, he’s still figuring out what he was meant to be. Life has not exactly gone to plan, but it’s been eventful.

When he’s not writing, Joe spends as much time as possible walking his ageing hound, looking for purpose and adventure.

Joe Gibson is a pseudonym. Seventeen is his first book.