The Smile

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

The first look was biology. The second was a choice.

Six o'clock in the morning. September. A Welsh valley in the dark. He's running three miles in punishment for looking at a girl. They call it character building. The character in question isn't enjoying the process.

So begins five years at Carrow Hall: a gothic boarding school dropped into a valley in Wales, with towers, quads, and a clock that tells the time whether you want to know it or not. There are unwritten rules for everything, friendships that will hold for decades, and, in time, a girl. Charlotte.

The first look didn't count. Everyone looked. The second look, an instant later, that one was his.

What follows is a quiet, complete obsession he tells absolutely nobody about. There's also Becca, who put her hand out at the bar one evening because she actually wanted to meet him. And, eventually, a smile across a dark quad on the worst night of his life.

'I never want to feel that again. Not ever. Not once.'

Then the long unfolding afterwards: a working encryption algorithm written at nineteen in a kitchen while making tea, a letter to San Francisco, a London bank, an office in Tokyo, and three bullet holes in a car in Kabul.

Funny, sharp, and unsentimental, The Smile is a debut about wanting something completely and losing it before you ever had it, the friends who turn out to have been carrying things too, and the long view back.