Dud Avocado, The

Description: THE DUD AVOCADO gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. It is, as the GUARDIAN observes, 'one of the best novels about growing up fast'. 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? Review: '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 Author Biography: Elaine Dundy was born and raised in New York. As an actress, she worked in Paris and London, where she met her husband, the late Kenneth Tynan. THE DUD AVOCADO is based on the year she spent in Paris.