The Lemon Grove
-
-
3.2 • 12 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Set on the rugged, mountainous west coast of Mallorca, this taut, sultry, brilliantly paced novel is an urgent meditation on female desire, the vicissitudes of marriage and the allure of youth.
Taking place over the course of one week, The Lemon Grove lands in the heat of Deia, a village on an island off the southeast coast of Spain. Jenn and Greg are on their annual holiday to enjoy languorous, close afternoons by the pool, and relaxed dinners overlooking the rocks. But the equilibrium is upset by the arrival of their teenage daughter, Emma, and her boyfriend, Nathan. Jenn, in her early forties, loves her (older) husband and her (step)daughter and is content with her life, she thinks. But when this beautiful, reckless young man comes into her world, she is caught by a sexual compulsion that she's seldom felt before. As the lines hotly blur between attraction, desire and obsession, Jenn’s world is thrown into tumult--by Nathan's side, she could be young and carefree once again, and at this stage in her life, the promise of youth is every bit as seductive as the promise of passion. Jenn struggles between the conflicting pulls of resistance and release, and the events of the next few days have the potential to put lives in jeopardy as the players carry out their roles in this unstoppably sexy and unputdownable novel from a brilliant observer of the human condition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the start, English married couple Jenn and Greg expect their annual summer holiday to Majorca to be different this year, with their 15-year-old daughter, Emma, joining them along with her new boyfriend, 17-year-old Nathan. They don't yet know, though, just how different things will be. Jenn, as the reader soon learns, is actually Emma's stepmother, but she is also the only mother Emma has ever known. The close relationship between the two, however, is not enough to prevent the unexpected attraction Jenn feels for Nathan, which, apparently, is mutual. This novel from Walsh (Once Upon a Time in England) is driven by her awareness of the connection between lust and romantic love, natural beauty and artifice, and passion and regret. Equally compelling is the honesty with which Jenn confronts her own aging and the knotty emotions that this awareness triggers. Though Jenn's preoccupation with Nathan is necessarily myopic, it's unfortunate that the book doesn't provide much sense of her before this reckless May-December romance. While some brief sketches of the family's history are provided, the picture never becomes clear enough to fully illuminate Jenn's compulsions.
