The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak

Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Seventeen-year-old Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, an American soldier, at a neighbour’s party, she falls in love almost as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself. But Nellie and Margo are not nearly so blind…

Shortlisted
The Booker Prize 1973
Published by
Duckworth
Publication date

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Beryl Bainbridge at home in Camden Town, London, 1998

Beryl Bainbridge

About the Author

Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine

More about Beryl Bainbridge

Other nominated books by Beryl Bainbridge

According to Queeney
Master Georgie
Every Man for Himself
The Bottle Factory Outing