Thanks as always to Anna Webber of United Agents and to my editors Antonia Till and Alexa von Hirschberg and everyone at Bloomsbury Publishing.
A Note on the Author
Louise Levene is the author of A Vision of Loveliness, a BBC Book at Bedtime that was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott first novel prize, Ghastly Business and The Following Girls. She is a dance critic for the Financial Times and the Spectator. She has also been an advertising copywriter, a window dresser, a radio presenter, an office cleaner, a crossword editor, a university tutor, a college professor and a sales lady. Louise Levene lives in London with her husband and their two children.
Also available by Louise Levene
The Following Girls
For fans of An Education – a powerful and biting social satire about a girl struggling to find freedom in 1970s suburbia
When Amanda Baker was fourteen she found a letter written by her runaway mother to her unborn child: ‘Dear Jeremy’ it began ‘or Amanda...’ Now Baker is sixteen and sick of her lot as she moves miserably between lessons, her only solace her fifth form gang – the four Mandies – and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes. That is, until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game player. And so begins a passionate friendship that will threaten her future, menace her sanity and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear.
‘Fizzes with cracking one-liners, acute observations and acidic Social Satire’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Simultaneously funny – wryly and sometimes bleakly so – and painful to read. Levene perfectly captures the brutality of adolescence’
Sunday Times
‘Knowing and funny, this is St Trinian’s for grown-ups *****’
The Lady
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Ghastly Business
A deliciously wicked, witty tale of villainy, scandal, sex and science
London, 1929. A girl is strangled in an alley, the mangled corpse of a peeping Tom is found in a railway tunnel and the details of the latest trunk murder are updated hourly in the evening papers. Into this world steps Dora Strang, doctor’s daughter and filing clerk to the country’s preeminent pathologist, Alfred Kemble. Thrilled by the post-mortems and court cases, Dora is further fascinated by Kemble himself, a glamorous and enigmatic war hero. But her job holds several surprises and as things take a distinctly ghastly turn the tabloid journalists sharpen their pencils in morbid anticipation…
‘She writes with such energy and panache that I found myself screaming with laughter ... Her characters are a delight [and] she gets the period beautifully right, so that one is all the time aware of the serious intent behind all the gruesome fun’ Barbara Trapido
‘Deliciously dark’
Sunday Express
‘A hilarious mix of first love and formaldehyde’ Daisy Goodwin
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A Vision of Loveliness
For fans of The Talented Mr Ripley, a dark comic gem of a novel that recreates the grubby glamour of early sixties London
Jane James knows that she must have been born to better things than a dingy bedroom in her Aunt Doreen’s house in Norbury and a job as junior saleslady in a cashmere shop in Piccadilly. But then a chance encounter leads her to Suzy St John, a girl-about-town with the glamour and irresistible allure that Jane has rehearsed for so long. Suzy takes Jane under her wing, and Jane becomes Janey, a near carbon-copy of her new best friend who catwalks confidently through a seedy world of part-time modelling and full-time man-trapping. But Jane finds that she can never quite drown out the nagging doubt that there might be more to life than a mutation mink jacket or an engagement ring…
‘I loved this book. It wonderfully evokes the essence of the 1960s’ Joan Collins
‘Biting social satire, drenched in extravagant shoes, jewellery and clothes’
Observer
‘Louise Levene is a zesty storyteller and a master of the needle-sharp one-liner’
Daily Telegraph
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https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/louise-levene/
First published in Great Britain 2018
This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Louise Levene, 2018
Louise Levene has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Words and Music by E Harburg and Harold Arlen © 1938, Reproduced by permission of EMI Feist Catalogue, London W1F 9LD
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 4088 7878 1
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