The Lessons by John Purcell

What if your first love was your one and only chance of happiness? In our lives, some promises are easily forgotten, while others come back to haunt us. From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes a compelling novel about love and betrayal – and literature.

1961
When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. After Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.

1983
Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about the overlap between her life and her work, including one of her novels about the traumatic coming of age of a young woman. But she evades the interviewer’s probing questions. What is she trying to hide?

An intriguing, striking and powerful novel, The Lessons tells a compelling story about literature, love and betrayal, about how far writers will go in plundering their lives for their art, and about how much we’re prepared to forgive – if we forgive.