Room For A Single Lady

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Description

To Eugene Rafferty, girls are like money - they have to be saved. Despite living in 1950s Dublin, his three daughters, Bridie, Kitty and Rose, seem doomed to a Victorian childhood. However, as fortunes decline the Rafferty's are forced to take in lodgers and these independent but eccentric outsiders introduce the girls to new experiences - sex and superstition, of spite, of true love and tragedy. For in a world caught between the aftershock of the war and the transforming liberalism of the 1960s there are two states of womanhood: single, and caught up in the comic and desperate search for a suitable husband, or married and enduring the claustrophobia of suburban life. Evoking the magic of childhood and adolescence with rare subtlety, wit and warmth, ROOM FOR A SINGLE LADY is both delightfully comic and genuinely moving.

Reviews

'A sharp eye for detail that makes reading Boylan's work such a pleasure' SUNDAY TIMES 'This enchanting book, so evocative of the moods and sensations of childhood has the bite of pure gold' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Witty ... beautifully written' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Boylan writes like an angel, but an angel with a knowing eye' DAILY MAIL 'Love, pain and Dickensian dottiness. As ever, Boylan is like the sun coming out.' SPEACTATOR 'An enormously entertaining and involving novel.' IRISH TIMES 'This is lemon-eyed and luscious writing, subtle, oblique, poetic, hilarious, absolutely original. But the talent for local colour, that vivid image, the quirky ear, the olfactory evocativeness, is merely how she approaches the proper concern of the top-class prose writer- an intesne and insatiable curiosity about the lives of other people.' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'As 1950s Dublin slowly moves away from ghastly fashions, tight perms and rigid conduct towards a brighter, freer society, Boylan's prose captures the transition perfectly.' NEW WOMAN 'Boylan has captured the harsh process of growing up- its misunderstandings and sense of irredeemably arrested development- with deadly accuracy.' TIME OUT 'Boylan spins her fable with graceful realism, and is painfully good on the horrors and resiliences of loneliness.' GUARDIAN

Author Bio

"Clare Boylan was the author of five novels and three volumes of short stories. Her last novel, ROOM FOR A SINGLE LADY, was published by Little, Brown in September 1997.