The Dud Avocado
On sale
22nd January 2026
Price: £10.99
‘Funny, funny, funny. She’s wicked and wise’ GRETA GERWIG
‘One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence’ OBSERVER
‘Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true’ EVENING STANDARD
‘One of the best novels about growing up fast’ GUARDIAN
Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it . . .
Sally Jay Gorce is a girl hellbent on living. It’s the 1950s and she’s an American in Paris: witty, headstrong and disaster-prone. She dyes her hair pink, wears evening dresses in the daytime and prowls the Left Bank in search of love, adventure and fame. But an education like this doesn’t come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?
As effervescent as a champagne cocktail, The Dud Avocado is a deliciously funny cult classic.
‘One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence’ OBSERVER
‘Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true’ EVENING STANDARD
‘One of the best novels about growing up fast’ GUARDIAN
Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it . . .
Sally Jay Gorce is a girl hellbent on living. It’s the 1950s and she’s an American in Paris: witty, headstrong and disaster-prone. She dyes her hair pink, wears evening dresses in the daytime and prowls the Left Bank in search of love, adventure and fame. But an education like this doesn’t come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?
As effervescent as a champagne cocktail, The Dud Avocado is a deliciously funny cult classic.
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Reviews
Scandalous and entertaining . . . Both funny and true
SUNDAY TIMES ** 'Both funny and true
A youthquake classic that inspires joie de vivre
As delightful and delicate an examination of how it is to be twenty and in love and in Paris as I've ever read
**'A champagne cocktail ... Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste ... One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height...
I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)
A champagne cocktail . . . Rich, invigorating, and deceptively simple to the taste . . . One falls for Sally Jay Gorce from a great height from the first sentence
Readers turn to it again and again for its jokes, which are very funny and remain so after a dozen readings
For a highly likeable and amusing narrator, who throws herself into Parisian life. A cult classic to reconnect me with France and feed my love of sharp observational humour . . . a hedonistic whirlwind in Paris and the South of France, pulled along by its whip-smart American heroine, Sally Jay Gore (out of the way, Emily In Paris). This is someone I am desperate to drink Pernod with. Where life has felt so constrained, this was such a liberating read
