Esther Freud – författare

The highly praised author of Hideous Kinky, returns with a searing and sensuous tale young love set amid the heat and beauty of a Tuscan summer

The Independent calls Esther Freud “the best writer on childhood we have.” In Love Falls this brilliant novelist proves her power once again with an utterly charming and irresistible tale of adolescent love and self-discovery set in a foreign land.

When 17-year-old Lara accepts her father’s invitation to accompany him to Tuscany for the summer, she’s excited and trepidatious. But, her fears prove groundless, for the villa’s closest neighbors are the contagiously adventurous Willoughbys, the teenaged brood of a wealthy British lord. Caught up in their torrential good humor—and snared particularly by Kip Willoughby’s dark, flirtatious eyes—Lara sets off on a summer adventure full of danger, first love, and untold consequences that will change her life.

“Unexpected and satisfying.” — New York Newsday

The architect Klaus Lehmann loves his wife, Elsa, with a passion that continues throughout their married life despite long periods of separation. Almost half a century after Lehmann’s death in the village of Steerborough, a young woman, Lily, arrives to research his life and work. Pouring over Klaus’s letters to Elsa, Lily pieces together the story of their lives together and apart. And alone in her rented cottage by the sea, she begins to sense an absence in her own life that may not be filled by simply going home.

The Sea House is the story of the village of Steerborough and the marshes and the sea beyond. It is the story of one generation living in the footprints of another; of a landscape shaped by lives, and lives shaped by landscape. With characteristic skill and a new depth and range, Esther Freud explores the twisting paths that people take—and the places where those paths meet.

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.

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.

The debut novel from the author of Summer at Gaglow, called "a near-seamless meshing of family feeling, history and imagination" by the New York Times Book Review

Escaping gray London in 1972, a beautiful, determined mother takes her daughters, aged 5 and 7, to Morocco in search of adventure, a better life, and maybe love. Hideous Kinky follows two little English girls -- the five-year-old narrator and Bea, her seven-year-old sister -- as they struggle to establish some semblance of normal life on a trip to Morocco with their hippie mother, Julia. Once in Marrakech, Julia immerses herself in Sufism and her quest for personal fulfillment, while her daughters rebel -- the older by trying to recreate her English life, the younger by turning her hopes for a father on a most unlikely candidate.

Shocking and wonderful, Hideous Kinky is at once melancholy and hopeful. A remarkable debut novel from one of England''s finest young writers, Hideous Kinky was inspired by the author''s own experiences as a child. Esther Freud, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, lived in Marrakech for one and a half years with her older sister Bella and her mother. Hideous Kinky is now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet ("Titanic," "Sense and Sensibility").