Love falls - Esther Freud

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 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 Fallsis an unforgettable story about families, secrets, and new love - about adolescence in all its awkwardness and excitement. It is a beautiful, troubling novel from the acclaimed author of Hideous Kinky.