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Seventeen

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About this listen

 It’s 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.

For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing.

Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life for seventeen years. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at seventeen.©2023 Joe Gibson (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, UK Thought-Provoking Inspiring
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This is such an important story and is really well written and read. I simply couldn’t stop listening. This is such a brave story to tell and the author really should be commended for telling a truth that is so complicated and nuanced in a way that is entertaining without being salacious. An incredible read/ listen.

Binge listened to the entire thing

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A well told story of experience of seduction & abuse of power that profoundly changed the course of author’s life. All while bystanders watched. A story that must be shared to prevent this happening to others.

Lolita in reverse

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Well written and really well read.
Gripping
Disturbing
Sad
This is story that deserves to be told
and to be heard

Oof

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An eloquently written and absolutely heart-wrenching memoir - the crescendo of events that culminate throughout the author’s adolescence are in equal parts astounding and terrifying - relayed in a sensitive and brilliant performance by Luke Thompson. Thank you for sharing your story Joe.

Harrowing

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As someone who went to high school in the 1980s and has subsequently had a career in education, it has always troubled me that what went on in my childhood was considered acceptable and so the adults failed to intervene. This book gives a powerful insight into the subtle, manipulative behaviours and it is brilliantly crafted.

An incredible insight

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