25 Books You Can't Put Down

Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange by Amanda Smyth

256 pages; Shay Areheart

The death of innocence is like catnip to fiction writers, and Amanda Smyth pounces on it with all four paws in her debut novel, Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange (Shaye Areheart). The Irish-Trinidadian Smyth sets the scene in steamy Tobago, where lovely, parentless Celia lives with her Aunt Tassi and her aunt's husband, Roman, a man who "could crawl under a snake's belly on stilts." It doesn't take a soothsayer (though one happens to be handy) to predict this adolescent's perilous and passionate coming of age.

First chapter: Read an excerpt from Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange
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