Product Description

Nine-year-old Tess has never seen anything like The Wild. An old bakery, converted into a home, it has a fireplace big enough to sit in, a garden with a badminton net and another one for vegetables. And then there's William, its owner. Single father of three, he cooks homemade ravioli, cuts trees down with a chainsaw and plays the guitar. When her mother, Francine, rents two rooms from him, Tess can hardly believe her luck. Her brother Jake, however, proves harder to convince. As the two grown-ups begin to fall for each other, Tess struggles to please the adults, as well as win Jake round. But she finds that good intentions don't always bring happiness and that adults are disturbingly capable of making mistakes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #564351 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'A beautiful book, savage and tender by turns ... attending to Esther Freud's still, truthful voice becomes not only a pleasure but a necessity' Jonathan Coe 'Wonderful ... Freud has a precious and remarkable gift for creating fictional children. She is infinitely patient with the subtle differences between the worlds of children and adults, and her descriptions of the collisions between them are hauntingly beautiful' The Times 'Ranks alongside Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha as one of the very few great contemporary novels about childhood' William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sunday 'I cannot remember reading so exact and involving an evocation of what it is like to be a child' Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Esther Freud was born in London in 1963. She trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was made into a feature film starring Kate Winslet. She has since written four other novels. Her books have been translated into thirteen languages. Her most recent novel was The Sea House.

Customer Reviews

Becoming a kid again
I loved this book, which I snapped up after reading Hideous Kinky, and couldn't put it down (the sort of book you are tempted to read under your desk at work to find out what happened after you got off the train).

Tess is beautifully drawn character: I could have wept at her attempts to get William to love her - knitting him a pair of lumpy socks, caring for his chickens like royalty, desperate to be chosen to help him cook - all of this is described in such honest childlike detail you can really feel her pain when she doesn't get the approval she is seeking. Her anguish when her painful secret is revealed is spot on, how well we all remember the humiliation of something Important (to us) being exposed by unthinking adults.

Her brother Jake is also a wonderfully evoked character. He is protective of her but distant when it comes to his own inner feelings on their unconventional lives, and you always sense the tide of emotion he is holding back which is revealed at the end of the book.

I was also charmed by the sense of freedom of childhood, the wild setting for the book is contrasted with the maze of London which Jake and Tess have to negotiate to see their part-time dad.

Buy it!

Redolent evocation of childhood.
This book made me feel the need to reassess my own attitudes on how fiction should be written. It was so refreshing to have a character like William who was so unsympathetic and unlikeable, yet without being an out and out villain, after all, he didn't do anything quite so bad, just made mistakes like all adults. His detachment from, yet selfish need for his children probably struck some uncomfortable chords with some readers. This book makes no apologies for showing up parents to be fallable and capable of being selfish, and in some respects can be quite savage in tone, whilst also tenderly demonstrating the naivety and wisdom that children posses. My only criticism would be the need for a little more background and a few less loose ends (what happened to Victor and Felicity?). A winsome evocation of a rural childhood, that has a dream like quality, punctuated with grit and realism.

brilliantly accurate account of a child's world
Esther Freud has done it again - only this time it's even better. She really is able to get completely under the skin of a child.

10-year-old Tess is uprooted with her brother to go and lodge with William and his three daughters. William is such an incredibly-drawn character: he's one of those people so convinced of his own worth and decency, but in actual fact is a wicked, self-obsessed, vain creature. I conceived such a loathing for his fake levity, pseudo-hippy stance that I almost considered stopping being a vegetarian just because he is.

The terrible difficulty for a child to comprehend and have any impact upon a baffling adult world is so accurate here.

This is a wonderful, perceptive, moving book which is achingly beautiful in the way it's written. I couldn't stop reading it, and had to put my life on hold until I finished it...