Showing The French Tutor by Judith Armstrong

Albertine is an exquisite rose. For a short, rampant period in spring, she puts out mouth-watering apricot-pink flowers. But her name signifies the unbearable: the likelihood that you are being deceived.

At thirty, Emily King is no ingenue, but when she takes a job as a French tutor and meets Lewis Lincoln, a handsome and charismatic professor many years her senior, she falls for him with foolish haste. As Emily guides her students through the work of Balzac, Flaubert and her beloved Proust, life and literature connect in unexpected ways, foreshadowing disturbing discoveries to come. Emily gradually comes to understand how little she knows about her evasive new lover and they are drawn irresistibly towards a devastating and utterly unpredictable climax.

Armstrong's style is wry and amusing, but it has a sinister undertone. The French Tutor is a compelling, clever romance, a tightly drawn psychological thriller-and a cautionary tale about the dangers of loving too much and too quickly.