A Wreath for the Enemy

A Wreath for the Enemy follows Penelope Wells, the precocious teenage daughter of a bohemian poet, who spends her summers at her family's ramshackle hotel on the French Riviera.

She keeps a private "Anthology of Hates" cataloguing her scorn for conventional people, until she meets Don and Eva Bradley, a proper, middle-class brother and sister staying nearby.

It is love at first sight between Penelope and Don, but the friendship that follows ends in tears.

Told in alternating first-person sections from Penelope's and Don's points of view, the novel follows both of them into adulthood as they wrestle with the values instilled by their very different upbringings, she craving order and convention, he chafing against his parents' rigid respectability.

A sharp, wry mid-century coming-of-age novel about love, class and the pull between freedom and order, it has drawn comparisons to Françoise Sagan and Iris Murdoch.