Bitter Orange
Claire FullerAn NPR Best Book of the Year
“Unsettling & eerie, Bitter Orange is an ideal chiller.” — Time Magazine
From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days & Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing & how far a woman might go to escape her past.
From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them―Cara first: dark & beautiful, then Peter: striking & serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives.To Frances’s surprise, Cara & Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, & before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, & smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled.
But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, & as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth & lies, right & wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.
Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; & Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award & was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MA in Creative & Critical Writing from the University of Winchester.
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