| |
 
|
|
Cajoled, chivvied and driven to distraction by her mother, seldom noticed by her father, her style cramped by her many siblings, Lalie longs for independence and love. But, however far she moves away from home, can she ever escape her roots? Caught up in the lives of her friends - Deborah, Roz, Lucy and Ali - Lalie wonders what will become of them all...
"I was taking the long view, here, re-visiting the same characters for a day each year for ten years... and aiming to capture growing up - adolescence and early adulthood - in (a literary version of) technicolor, because that's how, it seems to me, those years are lived..."
‘By turns funny and achingly sad’
—New Woman
‘a razor-sharp rites of passage novel.. the observations are acute, with lashings of wit’
—Woman’s Journal
’It’s great, buy it and pass it on to your girlfriends’
—Company
’For anyone over 40 who has forgotten enough of what it was like to be young and imagine fondly that those were the happiest days of their life, this book will be a salutory read. It captures with almost breathtaking accuracy most of what is awful about sixth form, college and the early working years… There is a bleakness in this landscape that feels and smells exactly like adolescence. Yet it is a remarkably rich and lively novel… All adolescent life is here, lovingly portrayed… Dunn is a gifted writer, and from her pen should flow more good novels in future.’
—Polly Toynbee, The Times
|
|
