“With a dazzling mix of directness and metaphor, Prose captures the centrifugal and isolating force of grief. . . . “[Goldengrove is] a moving meditation on how, out of the painful passing of innocence and youth, sexuality and identity can miraculously emerge.” — Los Angeles Times An emotionally powerful novel about adolescent love and loss from Francine Prose, the New York Times bestselling author of Reading Like a Writer and A Changed Man. After the sudden death of her beloved older sister, thirteen-year-old Nico finds her life on New England's idyllic Mirror Lake irrevocably altered. Left alone to grope toward understanding, she falls into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's boyfriend. Over one haunted summer, Nico faces that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them as she experiences the mystery of loss and recovery. Still, for all the darkness at its heart, Goldengrove is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of adolescence.

Expecting the usual carefree and happy summer with her cousin Paul at their grandmother's seaside home, Madge finds this summer to be different from all the others.

"Once a year cousins Madge and Paul visit Goldengrove, their grandmother's idyllic Cornish home. But one year as Summer turns to Autumn and as they are drawn from childhood to maturity, their seemingly indomitable grandmother turns to Winter, and the precious moments of innocence begin to be leached away... Years later Madge, now living at Goldengrove, reflects on her own grandchildren and the events and revelations which disturbed the tranquill idyll that was her childhood. With wisdom and understanding, Jill Paton Walsh creates memorable mood-music for the ebb and flow, calm and storm of changing lives and in so doing has formed a lasting tale of innocence and beauty. An extremely good story, marvellously told. As the story gathers momentum, the deeply understood characters, the golden atmosphere, the small change of everyday pleasures and ageless tragedies are all put over with such newly seen immediacy and such controlled mastery that the reader is carried along like a surf rider on the crest of a wave, knowing it must soon break' Times Literary Supplement 'Written with an intensity of feeling and care, with a Woolf-like awareness of the instant's sensation: a story

To the other passengers aboard a transatlantic ocean liner, Katharine Monahan might seem like a typical sixteen-year-old American girl on her way to study in a Junior-Year-Abroad program. What they don't know is that her family physician has given her only a year to live. Desperate to realize every dream she's ever had, she has left family, school, and friends in New Orleans to live in the only place she believes she truly belongs: Paris, France. But the Paris of 1986 proves not to be the Paris of Piaf, Chevalier, and Colette. Language and cultural barriers, hard as they may be, will prove the least of the crises she will face. Lonely and alienated in her newly adopted home, she finds solace and companionship with a congregation of expatriate American artists and misfits at Lost Generation Bookstore. Shadowed by the consciousness of her own mortality and driven by a panic-stricken desire to drink up as much experience as she can leads her into a number of bizarre relationships and even dangerous situations which challenge every moral, religious, and political belief she has ever held, but also expose the political and moral hypocrisy of those with whom she is involved. Among these is an expatriate American with heavy Marxist-Leninist leanings as well as a questionable past; a fashion designer with an equally questionable sexuality; a wealthy American businessman, who knows only how to wield power but is incapable of love, and a spoiled art student, whose immediate family prove to be a sample of French bourgeoisie life at its worst. Strengthened by her ordeals, she is suddenly overcome by a tragic new set of circumstances she cannot handle. Fleeing to the south of France, she is taken into the home of a wealthy Riviera couple, whose hospitality is inspired by motives less disinterested than they at first seem. A pilgrimage to Lourdes in the company of a kind yet worldly-wise young nun seems to promise a way out of her predicament. But upon her return to Paris, she encounters new pressures which eventually force her to make the most critical decision of her life: the choice between the ways of the world or the ways of the spirit.