The Palace Of Strange Girls by Sallie Day (HarperCollins, £14.99)
5:26pm Thursday 19th June 2008
THE tale of one family's week-long holiday in Blackpool in the late 1950s, a time of great social change as the younger generation clash with the attitudes of the wartime generation.
Sickly seven-year-old Beth and her older sister Helen spend most of the time trying to avoid their mother's claustrophic supervision, while father Jack, foreman of a cotton mill, is faced with a whole array of challenges and temptations before he finally resigns himself to life in a passion-free marriage.
A great debut novel with a terrific sense of time and place.
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