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 Seventeen-year-old Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn.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
Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge

About the Author

Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine. Although Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, she never won. Some degree of correction occurred in 2011 when, after a public vote, her 1998-shortlisted novel Master Georgie won a one-off prize, The Man Booker Best of Beryl.

More about Beryl Bainbridge

Other nominated books by Beryl Bainbridge

According to Queeney
Master Georgie
Every Man for Himself
An Awfully Big Adventure
The Bottle Factory Outing