Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349010373

Price: £9.99

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

‘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

Reviews

SUNDAY TIMES ** 'Both funny and true
EVENING STANDARD
Readers turn to it again and again for its jokes, which are very funny and remain so after a dozen readings
Rachel Cooke, Guardian
Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true
Evening Standard
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
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)
Groucho Marx
**'A champagne cocktail ... Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste ... One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height...
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’
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
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