Where to Start with Esther Freud: The Best First Book
New to Esther Freud? Hideous Kinky is the right starting point — but this guide matches different readers to the right Freud novel, from Morocco to Suffolk to Tuscany.
For almost all new readers, Hideous Kinky is the right starting point.
It is her most famous and most distinctive novel — a five-year-old’s-eye account of a year in Marrakech with her unconventional mother in the early 1970s. The present-tense narration from a child’s perspective gives it an originality that her later work, excellent as it is, never quite matches.
Start here: Hideous Kinky
The narrator is five years old and does not understand most of what is happening around her. Her mother is pursuing Sufi mysticism. They live in the medina. There are snakes in Djemaa el-Fna and Moroccan schoolteachers who confuse and terrify. The child registers everything and explains almost nothing — and the result is one of the most vivid portraits of Marrakech in fiction.
If you read it and want more, the complete reading order is here.
By interest
If you’re visiting or interested in Morocco: Hideous Kinky — there is no better fictional portrait of the Marrakech medina.
If you’re interested in English history or WWI: Mr Mac and Me — the Suffolk coast in 1914, and the true story of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s final years.
If you prefer historical dual-timeline fiction: The Sea House — contemporary Suffolk and the story of a German-Jewish émigré architect in the 1930s.
If you want something lighter: Love Falls — a Tuscan summer, an absent father, a young woman discovering someone she thought she knew.
By reader type
| If you like… | Start with |
|---|---|
| Morocco, travel writing (Paul Bowles) | Hideous Kinky |
| Historical literary fiction | Mr Mac and Me |
| Dual-timeline fiction | The Sea House |
| Coming-of-age in London | Peerless Flats |
Why Hideous Kinky Is the Best First Book
For a reader new to Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky is the best first book because it is her most celebrated novel and the fullest expression of her distinctive gifts, the delicacy, emotional acuity, and fine attention to childhood, family, and memory that mark her fiction. Drawing on her own unconventional childhood, Hideous Kinky renders the experience of childhood with particular vividness and authenticity, capturing the child’s perspective and the textures of an unconventional upbringing with the sensitivity and insight that distinguish her work. As an entry point, it offers the most engaging and characteristic of her novels, introducing her central concerns, the experience of childhood, the workings of memory, the complex realities of family, through a vivid and emotionally resonant story. It welcomes the newcomer with its authenticity and its fine emotional perception, drawing the reader into a richly realized world seen through a child’s eyes. It is her best-known and most beloved novel, the one that best represents her gifts and that has won the widest appreciation, so that the new reader encounters Freud at her most engaging. For the newcomer, then, Hideous Kinky is the natural and ideal starting point, the celebrated novel that offers the best first taste of her delicate and emotionally acute fiction.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Hideous Kinky to be a vivid, delicate, and emotionally resonant novel, an evocation of an unconventional childhood rendered with the immediacy of a child’s perspective and the insight of a thoughtful writer. You can expect to be drawn into the world of childhood, seen through a child’s eyes and captured with a fine attention to its textures, wonders, and confusions, and you can expect the novel to render the experience of an unconventional upbringing with authenticity and emotional truth. You can expect delicacy and emotional acuity, for Freud writes with a notable sensitivity and fine emotional perception, attending to the subtle realities of experience and relationship rather than straining for dramatic effect. You can expect, too, the workings of memory and the complexities of family, for the novel draws on memory and explores the bonds and tensions of family life. The novel achieves its power through delicate observation and emotional precision rather than through dramatic incident, rewarding the attentive reader with its authenticity and resonance. Expect, in short, a vivid, delicate, and emotionally resonant evocation of childhood and family, rendered with sensitivity and insight, an engaging introduction to Freud’s fine emotional perception.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Hideous Kinky has introduced you to Freud’s delicate fiction, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her other novels, which continue to attend to childhood, family, and memory with the same sensitivity and emotional acuity, and which extend her range across different subjects and settings. Her fiction continues to draw on the close relationship between personal experience and imagination, between memory and fiction, transforming the material of life into fiction of emotional truth, and her other novels develop her characteristic concerns and her fine emotional perception. Reading these after Hideous Kinky deepens your appreciation of her distinctive gifts, the delicacy, emotional acuity, and fine attention to the textures of experience that mark all her work, and reveals the range and development of her fiction. Her recurring concerns, childhood, memory, and the complex realities of family, run through her work, and the reader who has enjoyed her most celebrated novel will find them developed in her other fiction. Building your reading journey through Freud’s work is a matter of following her sensitive and emotionally acute exploration of childhood, family, and memory from one novel to the next. The reader who begins with Hideous Kinky and continues through her fiction will find a writer of consistent delicacy, emotional truth, and fine perception.
See the complete works
For the full Esther Freud bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Esther Freud author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hideous Kinky autobiographical?
Yes — Hideous Kinky is closely based on Esther Freud's own childhood. She was five years old when her mother (who is not named in the novel) took her and her sister to Marrakech in the early 1970s. The novel is told from a child narrator's perspective and draws directly on her memories of that year.
Which Esther Freud novel has the best setting?
Hideous Kinky for Marrakech; The Sea House or Mr Mac and Me for the Suffolk coast; Love Falls for Tuscany. All her novels are strongly rooted in their locations, and the choice of setting is a good guide to which book will suit you.
