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Love Falls by Esther Freud
Love Falls is set in the summer of 1981 just before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. 17-year-old Lara is invited by her father to go to Italy with him. Her father, Lambert, is a famous historian who fled Nazi occupation and changed his name. He's been distant in her life, having never married Lara's mother, a bohemian woman who traveled by bus across parts of Asia with her. She and her father stay in Siena with one of her father's friends, a widow dying of cancer, and she's introduced to the Willoughbys who live nearby. They are a depraved and promiscuous aristocratic family and Lara falls for their son Kip. As she struggles through the challenges of her burgeoning womanhood, she also finally gets a chance to get to know her father. Esther Freud's novel has received mixed reviews with the San Francisco Chronicle saying, "Freud, who, along with Kazuo Ishiguro, A.L. Kennedy and Jeanette Winterson, was tapped as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in the early '90s, deftly creates Lara with a perfect mix of trepidation, physical pride, devil-may-care attitude and buried longing to be her father's little girl. Love Falls lingers with the reader like the bittersweet memories of a final summer vacation."
