Esther Freud's latest novel, Love Falls, is a return to the comingof-age genre she has made her own, with another young protagonist discovering harsh truths about the adult world. We follow Lara, a 17-year-old who is invited to accompany the father she hardly knows on a holiday to Tuscany.

They stay with his old friend Caroline and she soon introduces them to her neighbours: the wealthy, incestuous Willoughby clan, who spend their long days swimming, tanning and distracting themselves with sex and shifting alliances. Freud perfectly conjures up lazy heat, cool pools and long, mouthwatering lunches of artichokes, prosciutto and mozzarella. It's a seductive, shallow world and it is easy to share Lara's mixture of attraction, envy and revulsion.

As she falls for the Willoughbys' "carelessly beautiful" son, Kip, the book also creates a feverish atmosphere of erotic tension. Lara, a vegetarian, finds herself eating steak on her first night in Italy and is soon introduced to other pleasures of the flesh. Freud is wonderful at creating a sense of yearning, where every brush of the arm or moment of physical contact is loaded with meaning.

When Lara sits next to Kip she is alert to "the tension in his shoulder, the heat of his leg". All of Italy becomes sexualised.

But there is also a darkness underpinning this world, which is full of unpleasant secrets.

Caroline, it transpires, is terminally ill. The absent mother of the Willoughby family has had a nervous breakdown due to her husband's affairs. In a deeply nasty scene, one of the men of group gets into Lara's bed and she is too afraid to cry out or fight him off. She tells no one but the event seems to pollute the rest of the novel, casting the Willoughby's flirtations in an ugly light.

This is a novel full of ironies, about romance and the grimier realities that it can hide. Love Falls is a lovely, summery read but one that . . . like an afternoon lying in the sun . . . may also leave you feeling discomforted.