Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter. Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence

*A classic novel of English adolescence

About the Author
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.

Reviews
She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie * Observer *
Lively....excellent * The TIMES *
One of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love * EVENING STANDARD *
A striking story * TLS *


Awards
Winner of David Higham Prize for Fiction 1975.



Book Information
ISBN 9780349114026
Author Jane Gardam
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Abacus
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 150g
Dimensions(mm) 130mm * 200mm * 14mm