Book description
Hundreds of hopefuls enter competitions, few expect to win - not even
Carole Joseph, who has entered the same contest 63 times, under a
variety of names, and is astounded by her prize of a holiday for two in
glitzy Las Vegas.
The winning name she ‘borrowed’ is that of Norah Toomey, a middle-aged
psychiatric patient - not exactly the ideal travelling companion for a
lively 18-year-old out for kicks. The two depart together, and a
surprising bond of affection and dependence develops between the
unlikely pair: impulsive Carole with her seesaw moods and explosive
sexuality egging on the shy, unworldly Norah, whose only break to date
from a lifetime in institutions has been the annual hospital day-trip to
Littlehampton.
But Las Vegas isn’t Littlehampton, as these two innocents discover to
their cost, as they are plunged into a lurid world of strippers and
gamblers, brothels and crime. Sin City
, on the surface, is a fairy-tale come (almost) true, a Disneyland for
grown-ups, but beneath the neon rainbows lies not a crock of gold, but
danger and delusion.
Carole chases romance as well as Lady Luck, changing names to match the
men she meets; lands up in a whorehouse in the desert. Norah, holy fool,
finds total freedom more threatening than total constraint. Her muddled
perception of the non-stop noise and neon, the garish merry-go-round,
which won’t stop and let her off, is both hilarious and moving. For both
women, Las Vegas is a watershed, a crisis-point.
‘One of the most interesting novelists of her generation. Intelligent
and accessible . . .’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational
quirks.’ Sunday Times
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
