The Lemon Farm by Martin Boyd

The Lemon Farm

by Martin Boyd

Macmillan, 1973, ISBN 0333139453, hardcover, dust-jacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, ex-library with stamps to end-papers and half-title page, pages 199-210 loose, dust-jacket shows minor edge and shelf wear (see photographs)

"First published in 1935 and now reprinted for the first time since 1937, Martin Boyd's The Lemon Farm is extraordinarily contemporary in its theme of the passion and purity of youth in a dirty, middle-aged world.  The two young lovers, coming together on their tiny island off the English coast, are highly individual: Davina, married to a baronet whose fortune comes from 'the evangelical beverages - tea, coffee and cocoa', who just hasn't got the right taboos in her blood; and Michael, innocent but 'sly, seductive, subversive'.  Though they are both in their early twenties, the novel is really a sort of praise of older women, for Davina's experience of the world makes her a generation of the spirit older than Michael.
Their lemon farm is a dream of an escape to somewhere Mediterranean like Cyprus; The Lemon Farm is a master craftsman's balancing of sunlit dream and chill, respectable, destroying reality."