Novel set around the building of the Empire State Building, MANHATTAN
Travels with a duchess

Location(s): Dubrovnik
Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
Era(s): 1960’s
“This is a terrible chronicle of debauchery. It is by my standards anyway, because I’m a very typical, ordinary, middle-class wife. You might not think it, perhaps, from what I’ve been telling you, but don’t be hard on me – it was the holiday that did it…”
First published in 1968, this deliciously funny, acerbic and honest novel is as fresh and as full of life as when it first appeared. It is a woman’s novel, luxuriating in its frankness, and for its heroines, Innes and Joan, a ‘holiday romance’, which they have created together, one which can never exist at home.
On her way to Yugoslavia, Innes Gibson loses her luggage, her patience and her head. She spends the next fortnight trying on a different life as well as another woman’s clothes. Aided and abetted by the enigmatic ‘Duchess’ she reels from
sight to sight, drink to drink and man to man, finding out more about herself in two short weeks than in the previous forty years put together.
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