The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy author Rachel Cooke editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Little, Brown Book Group
Published:26th Aug '93
£9.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
* Review coverage in women's magazines * To be featured on the Virago web-site
Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.
'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?
Readers turn to it again and again for its jokes, which are very funny and remain so after a dozen readings -- Rachel Cooke * Guardian *
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 * Sunday Times *
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)
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 -- Emma Reed * Daily Telegraph *
Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true * Evening Standard *
**'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 *
** 'A carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers * TIME MAGAZINE *
** 'As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read * SUNDAY TIMES *
** 'Scandalous and entertaining ... Both funny and true * EVENING STANDARD *
ISBN: 9781853815812
Dimensions: 132mm x 201mm x 22mm
Weight: 260g
336 pages