Sin City

Description

Hundreds of hopefuls enter competitions, few expect to win - not even Carole Joseph, who has entered the same contest 63 times, under a variety of names, and is astounded by her prize of a holiday for two in glitzy Las Vegas. The winning name she `borrowed' is that of Norah Toomey, a middle-aged psychiatric patient - not exactly the ideal travelling companion for a lively 18-year-old out for kicks. The two depart together, and a surprising bond of affection and dependence develops between the unlikely pair: impulsive Carole with her seesaw moods and explosive sexuality egging on the shy, unworldly Norah, whose only break to date from a lifetime in institutions has been the annual hospital day-trip to Littlehampton. But Las Vegas isn't Littlehampton, as these two innocents discover to their cost, as they are plunged into a lurid world of strippers and gamblers, brothels and crime. Sin City, on the surface, is a fairy-tale come (almost) true, a Disneyland for grown-ups, but beneath the neon rainbows lies not a crock of gold, but danger and delusion. Carole chases romance as well as Lady Luck, changing names to match the men she meets; lands up in a whorehouse in the desert. Norah, holy fool, finds total freedom more threatening than total constraint. Her muddled perception of the non-stop noise and neon, the garish merry-go-round, which won't stop and let her off, is both hilarious and moving. For both women, Las Vegas is a watershed, a crisis-point. `One of the most interesting novelists of her generation. Intelligent and accessible . . .' Sunday Telegraph `A writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks.' Sunday Times

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first 'novel' at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan's power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist's model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column. Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences -- strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam -- have helped shape her as a writer. 'Writing allows for shadow-selves. I'm both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.'