Sommer in Gaglow.

In her charming first novel, Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud explored a single year of her unsettled and unsettling childhood, instantly revealing her light touch with the serious. Even those who chose to scour the book for snatches of her famous father, the painter Lucian Freud, were struck by its comic strengths, compressed narrative, and preternatural ability to convey incidents and events that were well beyond the five-year-old narrator's comprehension. But when Freud's second, darker novel, Peerless Flats, was also drawn from life, some began to wonder if she was not forever condemned to repeat her past.