Elaine Dundy – författare

''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 STANDARDThe 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

''A gloriously funny novel . . . it still brings a smile to my face forty years later'' JILLY COOPER''Definitely demonic, exquisitely carved, deadly murderous comedy'' DAWN POWELL, WASHINGTON POST'' Elaine Dundy''s young and sexy American heroine, named (excellently) Honey Flood'' LOS ANGELES TIMESIn The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy revealed the life of the young expatriate in Paris in all its hilarious and heartbreaking drama. With The Old Man and Me, written when Dundy was living in England in the early 1960s, she tackles the American girl in London, a bit older but certainly no wiser. There''s love and there''s revenge. Betsy Lou Saegessor is bent on revenge. Her father is dead and to top it off, the vast fortune that should have been hers has ended up, through the second marriage of her now deceased stepmother, in the bank account of the legendary and elusive Englishman, C. D. McKee.So Betsy sets out from New York to seduce and betray him. C .D. is fat and ugly, but boy is he sexy. Betsy follows him through the night clubs of London, grooving to jazz, smoking hash and plotting murder.