The Great Godden

This is the story of one family, one dreamy summer – the summer when everything changes. In a holiday house by the sea, in a big, messy family, one teenager watches as brothers and sisters, parents and older cousins fill hot days with wine and games and planning a wedding.

Enter the Goddens – irresistible, charming, languidly sexy Kit and surly, silent Hugo. Suddenly there's a serpent in this paradise – and the consequences will be devastating.

The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff

“Meg Rosoff’s summer novel is far too good to be monopolised by the teenage market. My advice: buy it for the young person in your life and then sneak off with it yourself.”
— Alex O’Connell, The Times, 27 Jun 2020

Facebook Live: Authors in Isolation

Meg talks about the Great Godden…and other things during a Facebook Live video event.
— At Home With, 23 June 2020

When the nights are still, I head to the water like a zombie...

How the novelist Meg Rosoff discovered that her definition of perfect happiness is a dip in the North Sea after dark.
— Meg Rosoff, The Daily Telegraph, 03 June 2020

“A classic summer, coming-of-age story, wonderfully done… Its hazy nostalgia tempered by a winning self-awareness, The Great Godden is a joyful, generous read”
—Novel of the Week, Sunday Telegraph

The High Low (podcast) review

“I read it at the same time as my niece who is 14 and she absolutely loved it… The offering is so good it made me long to be 12 or 13 again… Very enjoyable for adults as well… A brilliant short book for someone looking for a thoughtful, impactful summer read… It sounds like it’s going to be the quintessential holiday romance but it’s so much more than that. It’s more a danger of manipulation and judging a book by its cover and it deals so well with this so well… Entirely non-preachy… A great book for teenagers to read as they become aware of their sexuality and the power that they have or that they feel they don’t have. I loved the subtle reminders of agency and autonomy… A great way to have a tricky conversation with a teenager in your life. And it’s also a rattlingly good yarn!”
—Pandora Sykes

“Very much beside the point, especially as you’ve just talked about not judging a book by its cover, but what a beautiful book jacket… you can imagine as a teenager it’s a really cool book to be reading”
—Dolly Alderton

The Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week

“This smart and humorous novel is, from the first sentence, rapture to read. Each paragraph is crafted with a joke, insight or observation that makes you eager for more. A convincing modern family (swearwords and all) are spending the summer in their beach house, where the neighbours are beloved old friends. It evokes the feeling of being on holiday so vividly, it seems to put sand between your toes. A coming-of-age story for the unnamed narrator, the eldest of four skilfully characterised siblings, it is also an original take on teenage passion and an antidote to the clichés of young adult love stories. When a charismatic boy joins the party, two of the siblings fall for him. But this is not a romance: it is about manipulation, narcissism and how dangerous infatuation can be. Its warning rings true.”
——Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

“It wouldn’t be summer without a sun-drenched coming-of-age story, so beautifully realised in Meg Rosoff ’sseductive and elegant The Great Godden. In an almost implausibly golden British summer, two families congregate at an idyllic house by the sea until the arrival of American brothers Kit and Hugo is the catalyst for devastating change. The heady nostalgia and sweet ache of first love and lost innocence recall classics such as Bonjour Tristesse.”
—Fiona Noble, Observer YA Books of the Month

“No one writes the way Rosoff does - as if she's thrown away the rules. I love her fizzy honesty, her pluck, her way of untangling emotion through words”
— Daily Telegraph

“Like Ephron, Rosoff has a lightness of touch, and is also a clever comic writer: her dialogue is sharp, her characters keenly observed and ruthlessly well realised”
— The Sunday Times

EXTRACT

1

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. You look into the eyes of your beloved and see not only the person you’ve always dreamed you’d meet, but the you you’ve always secretly believed in, the you that inspires longing and delight, the you no one else really noticed before.

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. 

2

Every year when school ends we jam the car full of indispensable stuff and head to the beach. By the time six people have crammed their barest essentials into the car Dad says he can’t see out the windows and there’s no room for any of us so half the bare essentials are removed but it doesn’t seem to help, I always end up sitting on a croquet set or a bag of shoes. By the time we set off everyone’s in a foul mood.

The drive is a nightmare of shoving and arguing and Mum shouting that if we don’t all pipe down she’s going to have a breakdown and once a year Dad actually pulls over to the side of the road and says he’s just going to sit there till everyone shuts the fuck up.

We’ve been coming to the beach since we were born, and on the theory that life existed even before that, Dad’s been coming since he was a child, and Mum since she met Dad and gave birth to us four.

The drive takes hours but eventually we come off the motorway and that’s when the mood changes. The familiarity of the route does something to our brains and we start to whine silently, like dogs approaching a park. It’s half an hour precisely from the roundabout to the house and we know every inch of landscape on the way. Bonus points are earned for deer or horses glimpsed from the car windows or an owl sitting on a fence post or Harry the Hare hopping down the road. Harry frequently appears in the middle of road on the day we arrive and then again on the day we leave; incontrovertible proof that our world is a sophisticated computer simulation.

There’s no such thing as a casual arrival. We pull into the grass drive, scramble out of the car and then shout and shove our way into the house, which smells of ancient upholstery, salt, and musty stale air till we open all the windows and let the sea breeze pour through in waves.

The first conversation always goes the same way:

MUM (dreamy): I miss this place so much.

KIDS: So do we!

DAD: If only it were just a bit closer.

KIDS: And had heat.

MUM (stern voice): Well it’s not. And it doesn’t. So stop dreaming.

No one bothers to mention that she’s the one who brings the subject up every time.

Mum’s already got out the dustpan and is sweeping dead flies off the windowsills while Dad puts food away and makes tea. I run upstairs, open the drawer under my bed and pull on last summer’s faded sweatshirt. It smells of old house and beach and now so do I.

Alex is checking bat box cameras on his laptop and Tamsin’s unpacking at superhuman speed because Mum says she can’t go down to see her horse until everything’s put away. The horse doesn’t belong to her but she leases him for the summer and would save him in a fire hours before she’d save any of us.

Mattie, who’s recently gone from too-big features and no tits to looking like a sixteen-year-old sex goddess, has changed into sun dress and wellies and drifted down to the sea because she sees her life as one long instagram post. At the moment she imagines she looks romantic and gorgeous which unfortunately she does.

There’s a sudden excited clamour as Malcolm and Hope arrive downstairs to welcome us to the beach. Gomez, Mal’s very large, very mournful Basset Hound, bays at the top of his lungs. Tamsin and Alex will be kissing him all over so really you can’t blame him.

Mal clutches two bottles of cold white wine and while everyone is hugging and kissing, Dad mutters “it’s about time”, abandons the tea and goes to find a corkscrew. Tam hurls herself at Mal, who sweeps her up in his arms and swings her around like she’s still a little girl.

Hope makes us stand in order of age: Me, Mattie, Tamsin and Alex. She steps back to admire us all, saying how much we’ve grown and how gorgeous we all are, though it’s obvious she’s mainly talking about Mattie. I’m used to being included in the gorgeous-Mattie narrative, which people do out of politeness. Tam snorts and breaks rank followed by Alex. It’s not like we don’t see them in London, but between school and work and what with living in completely different parts of town, it happens less than you might think.

“There’s supper when you’re ready,” Hope calls after them.

Dad wipes the wine glasses with a tea towel, fills them, and distributes the first glass of the summer to the over eighteens, with reduced rations for Mattie, Tamsin and me. Alex reappears and strikes like a rat snake when Hope puts her glass down to help Mum with a suitcase. He downs it in two gulps and slithers away into the underbrush. Hope peers at the empty glass with a frown but Dad just fills it again.

Everyone smiles and laughs and radiates optimism. This year is going to be the best ever – the best weather, the best food, the best fun.

The actors assembled, the summer begins.