The French Tutor

(Paperback)

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'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.

Author Bio

Judith Armstrong was born and educated in Melbourne, and has lived in Europe, Russia, the South Pacific and the Americas. In 1996 she left the University of Melbourne, where she was teaching languages and European studies, to write full-time. She is the author of several non-fiction books including The Christesen Romance, shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year, and the The Cook and the Maestro: The Story of Stefano and Sergio de Pieri. The French Tutor was her first work of fiction, published in 2003; her most recent is the critically acclaimed War and Peace and Sonya, a novel based on the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, telling the story of her troubled marriage to Russian literary master, Leo Tolstoy.