A no-holds barred narrative that unflinchingly plunges readers into the darker side of a Bright Young Thing - a London coming-of-age novel with a delicious twist.
On paper, 23-year-old Judy Bishop is a successful journalist, the author of a first-person column in a Sunday paper, 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, teetering on the edge of obesity, wallowing in hard liquor and just about sustaining herself through a well-informed obsession with the golden age of musical theatre.
Judy is a woman in the mother of all ruts. 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 17 weeks in which to conduct the Great Overhaul, 17 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 provincial Novotel to frying her hair with domestic bleach - life, she finds herself scaling new heights of degradation, terror and disgust.
A stunningly accomplished debut from Rose Heiney, The Days of Judy B is clever, touching and almost disturbingly funny. It's a book for anyone who has ever felt their life plumbing the depths. It will take you from laughter to tears - via the dark places where fear and betrayal lurk in our heads.
