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The Dud Avocado

On sale

3rd May 2018

Price: £9.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349010373

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‘One of the best novels about growing up fast’ GUARDIAN

‘One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence’ OBSERVER

‘Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true’ EVENING STANDARD

The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living.

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950s, she’s young and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he’s single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted “citizens of the world”; an entanglement with a charming psychopath and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador.

But an education like this doesn’t come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?

Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

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Reviews

EVENING STANDARD
SUNDAY TIMES ** 'Both funny and true
Groucho Marx
I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)
Evening Standard
Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true
Rachel Cooke, Guardian
Readers turn to it again and again for its jokes, which are very funny and remain so after a dozen readings
Emma Reed, Daily Telegraph
For a highly likeable and amusing narrator, who throws herself into Parisian life. A cult classic to reconnect me with France and feed my love of sharp observational humour . . . a hedonistic whirlwind in Paris and the South of France, pulled along by its whip-smart American heroine, Sally Jay Gore (out of the way, Emily In Paris). This is someone I am desperate to drink Pernod with. Where life has felt so constrained, this was such a liberating read
Sunday Times
As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read
Observer
A champagne cocktail . . . Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste . . . One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence
OBSERVER *** 'As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read’
**'A champagne cocktail ... Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste ... One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height...