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 likelibood that you are being deceived.

At thirty, with boyfriends in Paris and England tucked away in her past, Emily King is no ingenue.

But then she takes a job as a French tutor and meets Lewis Lincoln. Suddenly, inexplicably, her world starts to revolve around him.

He is attractive and charming, and much older than she is, but as their relationship deepens his elusiveness begins to madden her.

What is he hiding? And how can Emily keep her longing to know him from spiralling into obsession?

The French Tutor, Judith Armstrong's debut novel, is a psychological thriller and mysterious love story, a novel about passion and betrayal which draws the reader irresistibly towards its devastating climax.