A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford

Seventeen-year-old Flavia is spending a solitary summer in a coastal French village, cramming for her Oxford entrance exams. Her structured world dissolves when she falls in with a bohemian circle of local artists and intellectuals, awakening her to a mature world of drinking, desire, and sexual experimentation. Flavia quickly becomes entangled with a married woman named Thérèse, only to be completely blindsided by Andrée—a sophisticated but highly manipulative beauty. Caught in a web of adult passion and deceit, Flavia’s naivety leads her into a devastating moral compromise that will alter her future forever.