Appleby House - Sylvia Smith

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Résumé :
Appleby House is Sylvia Smith's delightful, refreshingly candid account of a year spent in a shabby bed-sit in1980s London's East End.
Smith's engrossing, understated narrative invests the story of shared living: shifting allegiances, cleaning negotiations, debates about whose turn it is to change the toilet paper (it's color-coded) and who's been stealing whose hot water (50p buys 2 baths) with compulsive suspense of the highest order. As tensions build around Laura's adamant refusal to turn down her music or pretend to care about what her housemates have to say, we find ourselves astonishingly addicted to the goings on in this tiny corner of the universe. In the most artless and amusing way, Appleby House thoroughly indulges our very human fascination with the day-to-day and the surprising, often inexplicable, behavior of our fellow members of the species.

Biographie:
Born in east London to working-class parents as the Second World War was drawing to its close, Sylvia Smith ducked out of a career in hairdressing at the last minute to begin a life of office work. She slowly and completely accidentally worked her way up to the position of private secretary. She is unmarried with no children. A driving license and a school swimming certificate are her only qualifications, although she is also quite good at dressmaking. Misadventures was published by Canongate in 2001. Appleby House is her second book.