'You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.' It is the late 1950s and it is Existentialist time in Paris. But Viola, a seventeen-year-old English girl, is languishing in a chaotic finishing school in the dull French countryside. Under the distrait tutelage of Tante Aimee, the pupils lounge about the crumbling grey chateau playing records and smoking Gitanes, awaiting the arrival of some suitably aristocratic young blood - and life. Then a new teacher arrives - Sabine. Sabine, with her long tanned legs, wide straight shoulders and mane of golden hair. Sabine, who arrives each morning in her old Deux Cheveaux, dragging on her Gauloises, truculent, difficult. And passion strikes. But there are dark forces at play in the chateau and a dangerous secret is about to be uncovered...Sensual, Gothic, with more than a hint of Colette, Sabine is a dark tale of schoolgirl love and compulsion.
