A Gentle Cause of Chaos

About the Book

It is the end of July, 1964. Janie Thwaite, an immature but humorous and pleasant young woman from the UK, escapes from a constricting background by taking a teaching post in a tiny, insignificant, English-speaking private school in Vautigny, a Swiss village near Geneva. On her entrance as a new teacher she experiences love at first sight (LAFS) - or so she believers - when she encounters the handsome social studies teacher.

Her love affair runs parallel with the gathering storms in the small school with the grand name: 'Mr. William's Institute of Education'.

Janie is liked by her colleagues, who are all eccentric, with their own secrets and quiet reasons for working in such a constricted milieu. Some of their love affairs coincide with hers and some of her attempts to help or be popular interfere with her companions' lives. Each person is to be affected by Janie's main faults: her naivety and propensity to say the wrong thing to the wrong people. She unleashes , step by step, without any intent to cause trouble, harmful interactions in the small and tightly closed community of the little school, which is the pride and joy of the owner, Big Bad Williams. Death and disaster follow, although her own life is released into the possibility of a happier situation.

In the final chapter, when she is a grandmother, she tells about the renovation of the Institute building which, with a new business venture led by her husband, brings together again the remaining people who were once caught up in the chaos of the school's downfall.

And she has the last word, deliberately designed to cause trouble.

About the Author

Emily Delacote has lived and worked in Switzerland for many years. In this, her first novel, she has invented a small, troubled school and placed it in a village not far from Geneva, in the beautiful French-speaking area near the lake.

She explores the blossoming self-confidence of a young English girl who leaves her home county, Yorkshire, to take up a teaching post in a tiny, private school owned by the overpowering Mr. Williams.