Sophie Mackintosh

Margaret Drabble

Esther Freud

Combining personal reminiscence with reflections on the history of the place over the years and through the seasons, for the first time this collection brings together writers' impressions of the Pond.

Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies' Pond

At the Pond

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.

A Novel

I Couldn't Love You More

Hideous Kinky

Susan Hill

I'm the King of the Castle

A tender and compelling story of an unlikely friendship and Esther Freud's most beautiful and masterful work to date

Mr Mac and Me

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.

From the author of Hideous Kinky comes a charming, surprising, and utterly irresistible tale of adolescent love and self-discovery. When seventeen-year-old Lara accepts her father's invitation to accom­pany him to a Tuscan villa for the summer, she's both thrilled and nervous for the exotic holiday. To her delight, she soon discovers that the villa's closest neighbors are the glamorous Willoughbys, the teenaged brood of a British millionaire. Caught up in their torrential thirst for amusement—and snared by Kip Willoughby's dark, flirtatious eyes—Lara sets off on a summer adven­ture full of danger, first love, and untold consequen­ces that will irrevocably change her life.

Love Falls

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.

Summer At Gaglow

“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.

The Sea House

This title presents advances in the integration and the optimization of product design and manufacturing systems. The book is divided into three chapters corresponding to the following three main topics: optimization of product design process (mechanical design process, mass customization, modelling the product representation, computer support for engineering design, support systems for tolerancing, simulation and optimization tools for structures and for mechanisms and robots); optimization of manufacturing systems (multi-criteria optimization and fuzzy volumes, tooth path generation, machine-tools behaviour, surface integrity and precision, process simulation); methodological aspects of integrated design and manufacturing (solid modelling, collaborative tools and knowledge formalization, integrating product and process design and innovation, robust and reliable design, and multi-agent approach in VR environment).

Peerless Flats

My Sister And Other Lovers

Desire

Esther Freud's best-known novel, which inspired the Kate Winslet film, published as Penguin Essential for the first time. 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.

Penguin Essentials

Sixteen-year-old Lisa has high hopes of imitating her older sister Ruby during her first years in London. Ruby's shady past and rockabilly boyfriend indicate to Lisa a life lived to the fullest. But as her family's prospects start to look bleak, Lisa must reinvent herself as the only sane and sensible member of her family. Spare, elegant, and often funny, Peerless Flats is an unblinking and moving portrait of a pained adolescence in 1970s London.

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").

It's 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 of families, secrets, and new love - about adolescence in all its awkwardness and excitement.

This novel interweaves the story of Sarah, a pregnant, out-of-work actress, with that of her ancestors in Germany at the time of World War I. For it is only now, as long-since confiscated estate of Gaglow is about to be returned, that the generations can be brought together across the decades.

Gaglow

'This book ranks alongside PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA as one of the very few great contemporary novels about childhood' William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sunday 'Everything was going to be different this year' - Tess is nine years old and wants her new family to work out, even though her brother Jake is not so sure. THE WILD is a brilliant, clear-eyed evocation of the collision of families and step families, adult and childhood worlds.

The Wild

A captivating new novel about the world of acting from the acclaimed author of Hideous Kinky and Love Falls

Esther Freud

About

Books

Join the club