The Lemon Farm Martin Boyd 1935

Dustjacket synopsis:
"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 the 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 experieince of the world makes her a generation of the spirit older than Michael.

"Their lemon farm is a dream of an escape to somewhere Meditteranean like Cyprus; The Lemon Farm is a master craftsman's balancing of sunlit dream and chill, respectable, destroying reality."

First Paragraph:

Michael had been an hour on Silver Island. It was very cold, but he was thinking of the approaching summer, and choosing a place to put his tent. Last year he had pitched it on the south side of the island, just above high-water mark, but there had been some rough weather and one night it had nearly been carried away in a gale. There were two sandy hollows in the middle of the isalnd. One of these would provide slight shelter for the tent, and the other would be a pleasant spot for sun-bathing - not that there was any place on the island really unexposed to the weather. There was no bush nor tree nor building, and its highest point was about six feet above sea level.

From the Sun Books paperback edition, 1973.

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Last modified: October 24, 2003.