On paper, 23-year-old Judy Bishop is a successful journalist, the author of a first-person column in a Sunday newspaper, in which she documents the life of a fabulously social young professional: clothes, men, parties, laughs. In reality, she is a friendless depressive: living alone in Bethnal Green, addicted to Victoria sponge, wallowing in hard liquor and just about sustaining herself through a well-informed obsession with the golden age of musical theatre.
With every week that passes, another exit is boarded up. Things have to change; and soon. Bracing herself to emerge from beneath her washed-out, single duvet, she gives herself 15 weeks in which to conduct the Great Overhaul, 15 weeks in which she can burst out into the functioning world in a flurry of men, wine, and song.
And that's when things really begin to unravel. As Judy careers around London on a quest to change her life - from losing her virginity in a Novotel to frying her hair with domestic bleach - she finds herself plumbing new depths of degradation and despair.
A stunningly accomplished debut from Rose Heiney, The Days of Judy B is clever, touching, disturbingly funny. This is a book for anyone who has ever felt their life teetering on the edge; it will take you from laughter to tears and back again - via the dark places of the soul where fear and insecurity lurk.
