The Wild

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.

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.

'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