Our Hearts Hang from the Lemon Trees

A hauntingly original memoir about a girl caught between two families, about losing and finding love, and about poems that can save your life.

“Evocative and bittersweet - a poignant family saga.”

The Bookseller

Laetitia Rutherford grew up in London, apart from holidays spent with her maternal family in France. She read English at Balliol College, Oxford, then started working in publishing first at Prospect magazine and then at HarperCollins. Five years later, she gained a Masters in 20th Century Literature from Goldsmiths College, before returning to work and becoming a literary agent. In her spare time, she set up Nibfest, a new literary festival in Notting Hill its inaugural outing was in April 2013. She is married to film director James Erksine and they live in London with their son.

In this captivating memoir, Laetitia Rutherford evokes a vanished world set alight by her enigmatic grandfather and her brilliant but troubled father - two men who never speak...The youngest daughter of a prominent journalist, Laetitia is brought up in genteel poverty in London's Notting Hill, in an eccentric family caught on the cusp between the Thatcher era and an older age of austerity. Her father, in his love of poetry and his coruscating ideas, is a constant source of inspiration but a hard man to impress...In the holidays, she and her sisters and mother leave him for her mother's family in France, where her tempestuous grandmother dominates, and where Laetitia is often left with her beloved but increasingly frail grandfather - "the oldest and the youngest thrown together to keep an eye on each other."..Over twenty summers spent at a villa on the Riviera and a crumbling chateau in the Loire - like the house in London, stuffed with books and fragments of the past - a riveting family drama unfolds, as the secrets of why the two sides never speak and why her father seemed so bizarrely absent are gradually revealed.

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