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The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home A matron at an unnamed boarding school in the remote English countryside, they regularly encounter the headmaster’s beautiful, self-assured wife Mrs S breezes in and out of the girls’ lives, admired for her enigmatic glamour more than the pastoral care she is supposedly providing The environs of the boarding houses, the adjoining church and lone village pub are much-photographed for their quaintness Relics of another age, they are beset by ‘endless rumours of ghosts and disappearances The imagined brutalities are always silent, always already happened’ A famous author, seemingly modelled on Charlotte Brontë, attended the school and hated it, living through a tuberculosis outbreak She based several uncomplimentary novels on her time there, before the school managed to transform this association into positive branding and preserved the places where the author had been most unhappy for posterity   As spring tips over into a baking hot summer, the narrator becomes consumed by obsessive lust for Mrs S, believing at first their ardour is not returned The very air seems thick with yearning: ‘the weather has not changed There is a lethargy Movement reduced, laughter dissolved into sighs’ As the frisson between the two blooms into a clandestine affair, Patrick’s present-tense telling makes time deliciously slow, the hot heaviness of the summer adding to the illusion that it could, perhaps, last forever, that the consequences will never arrive At first, the school girls seem mere   distractions, to be tended to during term and then sent home for the summer, their naivete a backdrop to the narrator’s full-throated adult desire But it becomes ever clearer that the setting is not just window dressing for an erotic fantasy of transgression, and is instead keenly relevant to the lovers’ very different understandings of their dalliance   A sequence of events concerning the girls gradually reveals the school’s ethos (and that of Mrs S) to be fundamentally at odds with the narrator’s own moral code When a girl’s violent rebuff of a schoolboy’s