Bitter Orange

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She is also heavy and awkward - we know her well, either from our own lives or many other stories. But she is telling us this herself as she’s wasting away in a hospital bed. As an old lady, she can be quite clever and sneaky, hinting at secrets a visiting vicar keeps waiting for her to reveal but keeping them from him and us. This is an atmospheric, haunting, and twisty story with beautiful language that will keep you captivated until the very end.

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller | Waterstones

Frances has taken care of her mother who declined in health for years. It was not at all a positive, loving experience, but she stoically did it, after all, it’s her mother and Frances felt she had to take care of her. It actually reads like a long, thankless, unending chore. Frances has no life of her own. She has no friends. Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques 700-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 81. Citrus × aurantium L. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online . Retrieved 17 April 2023. At the end of the novel, Frances is left with a wild mass of memories that have soaked into every fiber of her being—memories that have permanently stained her, like the spilled wine that has soaked into the antique furniture at Lyntons. For some, such stains devalue a piece of furniture, for others, they add character and perhaps provide the hint of a story. The thing is, one can never be rid of memories, so some tell different stories to try to cope with them. But the truth will out—sometimes, anyway. Bitter orange is an evergreen tree cultivated throughout the world for its round, orange or green fruit.Our Endless Numbered Days, the first of her five novels, was published in the UK by Penguin Books, and in the United States ( Tin House) and Canada ( House of Anansi Press). It appeared in translation in a further 12 countries. Swimming Lessons was published by Penguin (UK) in 2017, and was also published in the United States, Canada and a further 6 countries. Bitter Orange, was published in 2018 by Penguin (UK) and in the United States and Canada, and was/will be published in a further 6 countries. Unsettled Ground was published in 2021 in the UK, the US and Canada, and was/will be published in a further 14 countries. it’s a familiar scenario, where a younger (usually) person acts as a kind of excuse for a would-be couple to interact. Whether it’s adults in a park watching their kids or a teen couple offering to take a little brother to the movies, so they have an excuse to hang out. Frances lived for years in a small flat she shared with her ungracious, ungrateful invalid mother. As a young woman, she didn’t cross paths with people often so never really learned the social niceties.

Bitter orange - Citrus × aurantium | Plants | Kew Bitter orange - Citrus × aurantium | Plants | Kew

This may be called “Bitter Oranges”.....( citrus aurantium, having a sour juiceless taste), but the novel itself - was oozing juicy! https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/655880... (JimZ: another good review….likens it to Turn of the Screw…now I am really stoopid ☹ ☹ )There is a couple, Peter and Cara, who are living there—let’s be clear, they are all camping there—while Peter is cataloguing the artwork. The vicar was a man she met in the local church who seems pretty interested in her and her “friends”. The narrator, Zuhour, is an Omani student in a snowy British city (Alharthi studied at Edinburgh), who is pitched into gloom by guilt-laden grief over an adoptive grandmother, who died soon after she left, and an unhappy elder sister she has left behind. Isolated in an alien tongue, or as she awkwardly expresses it, “bound to a wheelchair that was language’s incapacity to fully express me”, she fears turning into her mother, whose postnatal depression was never dispelled. The Lyntons mansion is as much a character as Frances, Cara and Peter with lush and atmospheric descriptions of the house and the grounds. Through the exactitude of Claire Fuller’s prose, it’s almost impossible not to visualize the setting, smell the scent of oranges, and taste the lavish dinners that Cara bakes. At first this book put me in mind of Penelope Lively's style - a character, near death, lies reminiscing about a long ago, life-altering incident, but when an air of menace wafted into the proceedings, it seemed like Patricia Highsmith all the way. And, indeed, there's something of a Mr. Ripley feel to this tale of a tangled threesome, though there's more of a mystery in Fuller's book as to who's going to do what to whom . . . and when. low self esteem - socially inept - flaky - cautious - envious - jealous - resentful- ignorant about basic living skills - feels out of place - flips between being morally righteous and betraying her own values, not comfortable in her own skin ( emotionally and physically), longs obsessively to be accepted, a good listener but a taker - anxious, somewhat delusional.