Virago Modern Classics Book Club,

August 2018

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

This August we are off to Paris with Sally Jay Gorce.

Sally is a woman on 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

A hugely entertaining novel of sex, lies and Americans in Paris, dripping with the sarcasm those Americans are not supposed to have.

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