Everyone talks about falling in love like it’s the most miraculous, life-changing thing in the world. Something happens, they say, and you know …

That’s what happened when I met Kit Godden.

I looked into his eyes and I knew.

Only everyone else knew too. Everyone else felt exactly the same way.

From the incomparable Meg Rosoff, bestselling author of How I Live Now, comes a heady and timeless, intimate and earth-shattering wonder.

One dreamy summer, in a holiday house by the sea, two families fill hot days with food and wine, swimming and games, plans for a wedding and plans for the future.

Enter the Godden brothers – irresistible, languid Kit, and surly, silent Hugo. Suddenly there’s a serpent in paradise – but which brother is it? And is it love he promises, or something very much darker?

Profound and memorable, crystallising the exact moment at which innocence is lost, The Great Godden is a summer classic-in-the-making that sits alongside Bonjour Tristesse, The Greengage Summer and I Capture the Castle as an essential coming-of-age read.

“The Great Godden arose from the memory of one childhood summer that seemed to last for years and that — only in retrospect — announced that childhood was over." – Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff is the winner of the Carnegie Medal, the Michael J Printz Award, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and the coveted Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She grew up in a suburb of Boston and moved to London in 1989. She spent fifteen years working in advertising before writing her first novel, How I Live Now, which has sold over one million copies in thirty-six territories.

Meg has written six young adult novels, Jonathan Unleashed for adults, and a middle-grade series about a rescue dog called McTavish, who rescues a chaotic family. Meg lives in London with her husband, daughter and two lurchers.