The Lemon Grove

De: Helen Walsh

Narrado por: Kate Reading

A highly charged, sultry, beautifully written and compulsive one-sit listen, The Lemon Grove is an intense novel about obsession and sex - the perfect summer book.

Jenn and Greg have been married for 14 years, and, as the book opens, they are enjoying the last week of their annual summer holiday in Deià, a village in Majorca off the coast of southern Spain. Their days are languorous, time passing by in a haze of rioja-soaked lunches, hours at the beach, and lazy afternoon sex in their beautiful villa. It is the perfect summer idyll - until Greg's teenage daughter, Emma, arrives with her new boyfriend, Nathan, in tow.

What follows, over the course of seven days, is a brilliantly paced fever dream of attraction between Jenn and the reckless yet mesmerizing Nathan. It is an intense pas de deux of push and pull, risk and consequence, and moral rectitude, as it gets harder and harder for Jenn to stifle her compulsion.

This is a very smart novel about many things: the loss ofyouth, female sexuality, the lure of May-December temptation, the vicissitudes of marriage and the politics of other people's children. It is simultaneously sexy and substantive, and Helen Walsh's masterful, even-handed tone can't help but force the listener to wonder, what would I have done?

Beautifully written with the tension of a rubber band just about to snap, The Lemon Grove is a book that will have people talking all summer long.

©2014 Helen Walsh (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

Feels like an early draft…

I’m a big fan of slice of life kind of stuff: things where the mess stays messy.

But this just felt a bit shy of that, while entertaining.

Pleasantly entertaining

I thought this was a different book but enjoyed this read. Easy to listen too.