# The Dud Avocado

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado/9781844087600

![The Dud Avocado](https://quivercdn.com/covers/virago/elaine-dundy/the-dud-avocado_978-18-4408-760-0.jpg?v=2026-04-29%2002%3A11%3A05)

- 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: 978-18-4408-760-0
- Pages: 1
- Published: 2011-08-04
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## 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?