Hideous Kinky

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141956127
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
The thirtieth anniversary edition of a twentieth century classic - an unforgettable journey through 1960s Morocco, based on the author's own childhood For fans of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love Quirky, charming and suffused the footloose spirit of the sixties, this is the irresistible story of an English woman who decides on a whim to move herself and her two young daughters to Morocco. The ensuing adventure takes them through richly perfumed markets, dilapidated hotels and mystical Sufi retreats, via friendships and feuds, romances with nomadic street performers, hitch-hiking and nights camping by the coast - all seen through the eyes of a precocious five-year-old girl. Rediscover this transporting modern classic about the spirit of freedom, filled with the sights, smells and textures of twentieth century Morocco.

Hideous Kinky

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140174125
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Two little girls are taken by their mother to Morocco on a 1960s pilgrimage of self-discovery. For Mum it is not just an escape from the grinding conventions of English life but a quest for personal fulfilment; her children, however, seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands. ‘Just open the book and begin, and instantly you will be first of all charmed, then intrigued and finally moved by this fascinating story’ Spectator.

Peerless Flats

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0747594473
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Hideous Kinky, Peerless Flats confirms Freud as one of the best writers about childhood we have

Mr Mac and Me

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408857197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
It is 1914, and Thomas Maggs, the son of the local publican, lives with his parents and sister in a village on the Suffolk coast. He is the youngest child, and the only son surviving. Life is quiet - shaped by the seasons, fishing and farming, the summer visitors, and the girls who come down from the Highlands every year to gut and pack the herring. Then one day a mysterious Scotsman arrives. To Thomas he looks for all the world like a detective, in his black cape and hat of felted wool, and the way he puffs on his pipe as if he's Sherlock Holmes. Mac is what the locals call him when they whisper about him in the Inn. And whisper they do, for he sets off on his walks at unlikely hours, and stops to examine the humblest flowers. He is seen on the beach, staring out across the waves as if he's searching for clues. But Mac isn't a detective, he's the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and together with his red haired artist wife, they soon become a source of fascination and wonder to Thomas Yet just as Thomas and Mac's friendship begins to blossom, war with Germany is declared. The summer guests flee and are replaced by regiments of soldiers on their way to Belgium, and as the brutality of war weighs increasingly heavily on this coastal community, they become more suspicious of Mac and his curious behaviour... In this tender and compelling story of an unlikely friendship, Esther Freud paints a vivid portrait of a home front community during the First World War, and of a man who was one of the most brilliant and misunderstood artists of his generation. It is her most beautiful and masterful work.

I Couldn't Love You More

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063057190
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past It’s London, 1960, and Aoife Kelly—once the sparkling object of young men’s affections—runs pubs with her brusque, barking husband, Cash. Their courtship began in wartime London, before they returned to Ireland with their daughters in tow. One of these daughters—fiery, independent-minded Rosaleen—moves back to London, where she meets and begins an affair with the famous sculptor Felix Lehmann, a German-Jewish refugee artist over twice her tender eighteen years. When Rosaleen finds herself pregnant with Felix’s child, she is evicted from her flat, dismissed from her job, and desperate to hide the secret from her family. Where, and to whom, can she turn? Meanwhile, Kate, another generation down, lives in present-day London with her young daughter and husband, an unsuccessful musician and destructive alcoholic. Adopted and floundering to find a sense of herself in the midst of her unhappy marriage, Kate sets out to track down her birth mother, a search that leads her to a Magdalene Laundry in Ireland and the harrowing history that it holds. Stirring and nostalgic at moments, visceral and propulsive at others, I Couldn’t Love You More is a tender, candid portrait of love, sex, motherhood, and the enduring ties of family. It is impossible not to fall under the spell of this tale of mothers and daughters, wives and muses, secrets and outright lies.

Love Falls

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408827123
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A mesmerising coming-of-age tale set in sun-drenched Tuscany, from the author of Hideous Kinky and I Couldn't Love You More 'A vividly rendered portrait of a young girl's journey towards self discovery and maturity' Daily Mail 'Love Falls captures the delicious uncertainty and electrifying beginnings of first love' Glamour 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 holiday, she finds herself far away from the fumes of London's Holloway Road in the sun-scorched hillsides of Tuscany. There she meets the Willoughby family, rife with illicit alliances and vendettas. The more embroiled Lara becomes with them, and with the carelessly beautiful Kip, the more consumed she is with doubt, curiosity and dread. And so begins her intoxicating, troubled journey into self discovery and across the very fine line between childhood and what lies beyond ...

The Wild

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408831643
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Book Description
A novel about the wonder and difficulties of childhood, families and growing up by the author of Hideous Kinky and Love Falls 'A beautiful book, savage and tender by turns ... attending to Esther Freud's still, truthful voice becomes not only a pleasure but a necessity' Jonathan Coe 'Wonderful ... Freud has a precious and remarkable gift for creating fictional children. She is infinitely patient with the subtle differences between the worlds of children and adults, and her descriptions of the collisions between them are hauntingly beautiful' The Times Nine-year-old Tess has never seen anything like The Wild. An old bakery, converted into a home, it has a fireplace big enough to sit in, a garden with a badminton net and another one for vegetables. And then there's William, its owner. Single father of three, he cooks homemade ravioli, cuts trees down with a chainsaw and plays the guitar. When her mother, Francine, rents two rooms from him, Tess can hardly believe her luck. Her brother Jake, however, proves harder to convince. As the two grown-ups begin to fall for each other, Tess struggles to please the adults as well as win Jake round. But she finds that good intentions don't always bring happiness and that adults are disturbingly capable of making mistakes...

The Bear Woman

Author: Karolina Ramqvist
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770566864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Feminist autofiction from one of Sweden’s blazing talents. “Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” —Shelf Awareness Blending autofiction and essay, The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary detective work spanning centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite sheltered in a dark cave after her companions have died. This image soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And the maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable. Karolina Ramqvist explores what it means to write history—and to live it. “Karolina Ramqvist writes with frosty precision the kind of literature that is unforgettable. Her portraits of women hit deep into bone and marrow.” – Dorthe Nors, author of A Line in the World “Ramqvist’s acute rendering of embodied sensual experience combined with her evocation of her double character’s increasingly desperate circumstances create a story of high tension, startling insights, and lasting resonance.” – Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others “One of my favorite discoveries from this year.” – Samanta Schweblin, author of Little Eyes “Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” – Shelf Awareness

The Girl in the Garden

Author: Kamala Nair
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 1609418530
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
The Namesake meets The Secret Garden in this enchanting debut novel that is a dark, grown-up fairytale. The redemptive journey of a young woman unsure of her engagement, who revisits in memory the events of one scorching childhood summer when her beautiful yet troubled mother spirits her away from her home to an Indian village untouched by time, where she discovers in the jungle behind her ancestral house a spellbinding garden that harbors a terrifying secret.

Summer at Gaglow

Author: Esther Freud
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063210738
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Sarah is already in her late twenties with an acting career in London and a baby on the way when she learns from her father about Gaglow, his family's grand East German country estate that was seized before the war. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the estate will now come back to them. Sarah attempts to solicit from her father all he knows about Gaglow: the three lucky sisters, Bina, Martha, and Eva; their masterly governess, Fraulein Schulze; their father, Wolf Belgard, a prosperous Jewish grain dealer; their mother, Marianna, a "vulgar woman" whose children privately mocked her; and their older brother, Emanuel, wretched from the family to serve his country. Alternating between Sarah's life and her grandmother's childhood during the First World War, Summer at Gaglow unites four generations of an extraordinary family across the vast reaches of silence, place, loss, and time.