• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
  • The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
  • The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
1 0

The Dud Avocado

  • Author
    • Elaine Dundy
£9.99
£9.99
'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 STANDARD

The 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?

Not available for shipping to the following countries:

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  • Published: Jan 18 2001
  • 132 x 201mm
  • ISBN: 9781853815812
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Press Reviews

  • Observer
    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
  • Sunday Times
    As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read

  • Groucho Marx

    I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)

  • Emma Reed

    Daily Telegraph
    For a highly likeable and amusing narrator, who throws herself into Parisian life. A cult classic to reconnect me with France and feed my love of sharp observational humour . . . a hedonistic whirlwind in Paris and the South of France, pulled along by its whip-smart American heroine, Sally Jay Gore (out of the way, Emily In Paris). This is someone I am desperate to drink Pernod with. Where life has felt so constrained, this was such a liberating read

  • Rachel Cooke

    Guardian
    Readers turn to it again and again for its jokes, which are very funny and remain so after a dozen readings
  • Evening Standard
    Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true
  • OBSERVER
    **'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
  • TIME MAGAZINE
    ** 'A carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers
  • SUNDAY TIMES
    ** 'As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read
  • EVENING STANDARD
    ** 'Scandalous and entertaining ... Both funny and true