Ellie is sixteen, beautiful, passionate and troubled. Mike is forty four and saddled (he'd say) with a dull marriage and a mortgage. They fall in hopeless, all-consuming love. An age-inappropriate relationship? Infatuation or manipulation? Love or lust?Ellie is still at school. She's clever and perceptive. Dr. Mike is her teacher, almost at the pinnacle of his career. An abuse of power? Technically, yes. But is it clear who is doing the grooming here, and why?Perhaps things are not always as they seem. In any event, after a court trial in which Ellie's sexuality is put under a microscope, they elope and marry.Time and place are suspended while they live in a little shack on a Devonian cliff - the magical but entirely unreal land where the bong tree grows. They watch the beach and the sea and dance in the moonlight. But things unravel as both of them confront their age-gap relationship and Ellie struggles with her past. Which factor is the most destructive?In this forthright novel, the author challenges our assumptions and causes us to reflect on those stories we've read in the papers about students seduced by teachers. It is a shocking, amusing, savagely humorous, often vulgar and yet thoughtful story concerned with, first and foremost, taboo love. But other things are interwoven too: time and landscape; religious hypocrisy; contradiction and paradox; disillusionment and reconciliation and the occasional absurdity and transience of human love played out against the enduring backdrop of the ancient Jurassic Coast.ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS "PLEASE, SIR, I LOVE YOU!"
About the Author: Keith Warren was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex (UK), the son of an analytical chemist who went on to work in nuclear fission, and a biologist who liked cats. Whether or not this may have resulted in a dysfunctional family, readers of his books will have to decide! He trained as an English teacher in the late 60's and early 70's when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and she had commenced chalking the writing on the board. As a bumptious twenty-something, he once had the opportunity to put a question to her on an Eamonn Andrews TV show. She swatted him away like an irksome fly. He's been traumatised about it ever since. He taught English in several schools in Essex and the West Country before nose-diving out of a promising career in his 40's: the classic, hormonal, mid-life crisis. Keep reading! Suddenly, he found himself working in an Estate Agent's ultimately running his own business in the charming little village of Cheddar in Somerset. Too many marriages down the line, he met Her Loveliness and he now lives in the Philippines where he writes, tries to grow pineapples and complains vociferously about the local beer.