AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE by Beryl Bainbridge (Daunt Books £10.99, 288pp)
An Awfully Big Adventure is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Shortlisted for the 1990 Booker prize, this darkly comic novel builds to a devastatingly tragic conclusion that is painfully unpredictable.
Fifteen-year-old Stella, raised by her protective uncle and aunt after her mother abandoned her, joins a local repertory theatre in 1950s Liverpool where she becomes besotted with the director Meredith, oblivious to the fact he is gay.
Both outspokenly honest and innocently naive, she’s the perfect target for predatory, older actor O’Hara and his seduction of her plays out against a chaotic production of Peter Pan.
Amidst the egotistical theatricals, it is Stella’s capacity for love and loyalty that takes centre stage. Bravo!
TRAVEL LIGHT by Naomi Mitchison (Virago £10,99, 192pp)
Mitchison died aged 101 after a lifetime of radical politics and feminism and this beguiling fantasy novel combines fairy tales, folklore and Norse myths as a young woman finds her independence.
The daughter of a king, Halla is rescued from the murderous new queen by her nurse, who transforms into a bear and later hands her over to (rather lovely) Uggi, a Master Dragon. But as the old order is under threat, Odin, the All Father, offers her a choice – to ‘travel light’ or to stay within the conventional world.
Defying the ‘happy ever after’ female roles assigned her, she makes her choice and flies free. Despite its 1950s publication, this feels utterly contemporary.
THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy (Virago Modern Classics £10.99, 336pp)
In 1950s Paris, young American Sally Jay Gorce is revelling in her two-year break funded by her wealthy uncle who demands only that she enjoy herself.
And enjoy herself she does: dying her hair, wearing inappropriate clothes, taking a married Italian lover but ditching him for theatre director Larry in the hope of becoming an actress. And bedding many other lovers for the sheer hell of it…
Based on Dundy’s own year in Paris before marrying theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, this dizzying evocation of youth, sex, irresponsibility and doubt is laugh-out-loud funny and makes you yearn to be 21 again, drinking Pernod in a pavement cafe with a handsome lover.
