The Bloater

Why do the only men I know carry wet umbrellas and say Umm? I’m being starved alive. Quick: the first bookshop for a copy of the Kama-Sutra. Min works at the BBC as a sound engineer, and in theory she’s married, but her husband George is so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off even when he’s still in the room. Luckily, she has her friends and lovers to distract her: in Min’s self-lacerating, bracingly opinionated voice, life boils down to sex appeal-and of late she’s being courted by an internationally renowned opera singer whom she refers to as The Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). Disgusted by and attracted to him in equal measure, her dilemma-which reaches a hysterical, hilarious pitch-is whether to sleep with him or not.

Rosemary Tonks-the salt and pepper of the earth-is a writer who gets her claws into the reader with all the joy of a cat and a mouse. Vain and materialistic, tender and savage, narrated in brilliant, sparkling prose, The Bloater is the perfect snapshot of London in the 1960s.