Love Falls - Hardcover

Freud, Esther

3.1

956 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747586969 ISBN 13: 9780747586968

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2007

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It is July, three months after Lara's seventeenth birthday and a week before Charles and Diana's Royal Wedding, when Lara's father, a man she barely knows, invites her to accompany him on a holiday to Italy. Soon Lara has exchanged the exhaust fumes of London's Holloway Road for the sun scorched hillsides of Tuscany, for evenings spent listening to her father and his old friend Caroline exchanging cool, sardonic banter about a past Lara knows nothing about. But as Lara's skin turns golden, she begins to relax, seduced by the limpid beauty of the place, the rustle of the crickets and the lure of the pool. And then one night Lara is taken for dinner at the Willoughbys, their nearest neighbours, and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the carelessly beautiful only son of the family - A boy with five older sisters, who seems, fleetingly, unbelievably, to be interested in her too. But the Willoughbys are a family rife with conspiracies and vendettas, and the more embroiled Lara becomes with them the more consumed she is with doubt, curiosity and dread. Love Falls is an unforgettable story about families, secrets, and new love - about adolescence in all its awkwardness and excitement. It is a beautiful, troubling novel from the acclaimed author of Hideous Kinky.

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Product Description:

Unusual book

Review:

`Freud cleverly builds up a tense, erotically charged atmosphere' -- Lisa O'Kelly, Observer

`Freud is so engaging in her descriptions of the everyday, that the reader doesn't immediately notice the implications when things start going wrong' -- Emmanuelle Smith, Big Issue

`Love Falls is her most subtle and most affecting book yet, not least because the ageing father inspires pity as well as pride and fear' -- Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday

'Esther Freud's rich style is perfectly suited to this atmosphere of excess and sensuality.' -- Freida Klotz, Telegraph Review, May 31st 2008

`An Italian love story darkened by family skeletons' -- Evening Standard

`As a coming-of-age tale, Love Falls is expertly realised ... the
entire book radiates with the empathy for which Freud is known. In it, the
slack, soft pockets of self-pity and sentimentality, so much a part of
teenage life, are tenderly exposed, and the bruisingly porous boundary
between childhood and adulthood probed ... Love Falls is immediate, organic
and kind. Few things are more awkward and irresolute than a "grown-up
child" but the sense one is left with here is not of a phase finished or
completed, but a musical phrase, carefully and thoughtfully resolved' -- Stephanie Cross, Times Literary Supplement

`Compelling ... One of the collateral pleasure of Love Falls is
the chance to read a novel set in Tuscany in which the usual aria of sighs
and swoons has made way for something tarter'
-- Jasper Rees, Daily Telegraph

`Deliciously unsettling' **** -- Eithne Farry, Marie Claire

`Some fine writing transforms what might have been another story
of the English abroad into a vividly rendered portrait of a young girl's
journey towards self discovery and maturity' -- Daily Mail

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