Bitter Orange
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From the bestselling author of Swimming Lessons comes a suspenseful new novel set in 1969 England about one woman's obsession with a glamorous, hedonistic couple living downstairs who aren't what they seem.
From the attic of a dilapidated English country house, she sees them -- Cara first: dark and beautiful, clinging to a marble fountain of Cupid, and Peter, an Apollo. It is 1969 and they are spending the summer in the rooms below hers, while Frances writes a report on the follies in the garden. But she is distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she discovers a peephole which gives her access to her neighbours' private lives.
To Frances' surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to spend time with her. It is the first occasion that she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes till 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 -- and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence of that summer, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand all their lives forever.
About this Author
CLAIRE FULLER was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1967. She received a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn't start writing until she was forty. Her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the Desmond Elliot Prize and was a finalist for the ABA Adult Debut Book of the Year Award and the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband and two children.
Reviews
The atmosphere [Fuller] conjures creates its own choking sense of dread.
Claire Fuller's Bitter Orange, a carefully contained mystery, thriller, and horror novel, is a haunting contemporary echo of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith.
The story builds to a shocking finale, resulting in a thoroughly enjoyable book with a well-paced plot and plenty of twists and turns.
Page by page, Fuller enchants us with prose as thick as clotted cream, only for us to realize too late that she's been ensnaring us at every turn.
A novel you don't want to end.
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