The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden is a 1958 coming-of-age novel, crackling with suspense, and portraying love and deceit in the Champagne country in France. A memorable passage from this engaging novel based on an incident in Godden’s youth.

“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.”

Taking place in the shabby hotel of Les Oeillets, once gloriously elegant, the four children of the Grey family find themselves alone with the shady eccentrics who run the hotel. Like many of Godden’s novels, The Greengage Summer was adapted into film, this one a 1961 British production starring Kenneth More, Jane Asher, and Susannah York. Read More→