# The Dud Avocado

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/9780349010373

![The Dud Avocado](https://quivercdn.com/covers/virago/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado_978-03-4901-037-3.jpg?v=2026-04-29%2002%3A10%3A12)

- Book: [The Dud Avocado](https://www.bookquiver.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado) ([The Dud Avocado.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado.md))
- Authors: [Elaine Dundy](https://www.bookquiver.com/elaine-dundy)
- Publisher: virago
- ISBN: 978-03-4901-037-3
- Pages: 1
- Published: 2018-05-03
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

'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? 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