My Turquoise Years

Twentieth anniversary edition of Farrant's beloved memoir of coming of age with an absent mother in a vanished time

The setting is Vancouver Island, the year 1960. It is the era of the Three Stooges and the Red Menace, the apex of plastic, Arborite, and everything turquoise: high heels, pedal pushers, refrigerators, even cars. Throughout her childhood, Marion Farrant heard wild family stories of the sophisticated life her mother, Nancy, led far away in Australia. Nancy's world of riches and men seemed light years away from Cordova Bay on Vancouver Island, where Marion lived a working-class life with her aunt and uncle. But things changed the year she entered her teens. That year, Nancy threw everyone into a flurry with the surprise announcement that she was coming for a visit. This new edition of Farrant's beloved memoir of her fourteenth summer, capturing a lost time and place with love and hilarity, includes five companion stories, an introduction by Lynne Van Luven, and a preface by the author. Witty, tender, and wry, My Turquoise Years is a book for anyone who remembers being a teenager.