Love Orange

Author Natasha Randall
Narrator Sarah Borges
Publisher Quercus
Run Time 9 hours and 33 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Family life fiction, Humorous fiction, Impact of science and technology on society, Modern and contemporary fiction, Science: general issues, Spiritualism.

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What to expect

Jenny Tinkley lives to mother her two complicated sons and prop up her technology obsessive husband Hank, who has installed gadgets, cameras and voice recognition devices in their smart house. He tells her it's all designed to help her, but she is convinced their home is judging her- reminding her to load the laundry, buy milk, do better- and she becomes paranoid that she's being spied upon by the white goods. When she hears of an outreach opportunity at her church (where worshippers are encouraged to confess their sins via mobile phone), she feels that hand-writing letters to John, inmate 6587 at Flainton Correctional Facility, will be an antidote to her high-tech isolation, and a kindness to someone who is perhaps lonelier than herself. And Hank needn't know.

Letter by letter John pinches Jenny awake from the marshmallow numbness of her life. In their exchanges she expresses tenderness, unexpected affection. Constantly under surveillance, their letters chart a secret rebellion, a bid for freedom. But Jenny is becoming curiously dependent on the sweet orange glue that seals John's envelopes and their lives begin to converge with toxic consequences.

Love Orange throws open the blinds of American life, showing a family facing up to the modern age, from the ascendancy of technology, the predicaments of masculinity, the pathologising of children, the epidemic of opioid addiction and the tyranny of the WhatsApp Gods. The first novel by the acclaimed translator is a comic cocktail, an exuberant skewering of contemporary anxieties and prejudices.

(P)2020 Quercus Editions Limited

Critics Review

Imagine Richard Yates becoming fascinated by Donald Antrim before writing Revolutionary Road and you’ll have some idea of Love Orange. At turns funny, discomfiting, and darkly harrowing, Randall’s debut is real life inscribed upon the page. The classic American family of countless TV dramas and comedies is here fractured against the hard fulcrum of the current age. One of the most satisfying novels you will read this year. This book rules.

Christian Kiefer, author of PHANTOMS

‘In Love Orange we see the American nuclear family in meltdown, a phenomenon Natasha Randall describes with wisdom, wit, and a lot of heart. I enjoyed every minute of it’ Chris Power, author of Mothers

As an acclaimed translator of Russian novels, Natasha Randall has a fine-tuned sense of the absurd, and a wonderfully original way of seeing the world. A stunningly accurate portrayal of American society, shining with vivid dialogue and observation

Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

[T]he first novel by this acclaimed translator is an exuberant, comic, irresistibly dark examination of contemporary anxieties

Vanity Fair

An exquisite balance of humour and pathos…The setting and plot ofLove Orange is extremely well crafted

Lunate

Randall throws satirical light on everything from opioid addictions to the domination of modern technology in this exuberant and contemporary novel.

Independent

The translator Natasha Randall’s debut novel is a keenly observed account of the travails of an apparently normal American family . . . Hugely ambitious

Observer

Translator Randall makes her fiction debut with this assured and funny story of an American family in crisis trying to hide behind their new “smart” home.

The i

I was . . . hooked by this comedic take on the modern American family

Saga

I loved the rich emotional mayhem of Natasha Randall’s Love Orange.

White Review (BOTY)

Love Orange is narrated in a close third-person from multiple points of view, artfully moving between the characters to build an absorbing story. Randall depicts the very contemporary struggles of the Tinkley family with empathy. And her wry humour leavens the serious topics she tackles: the prison system, gender roles, the perils of intrusive technology and the slippery slope of addiction – whether one reaches for drugs or devices for relief from the “marshmallow numbness” of daily life.

TLS

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