Review
Take a young girl who won't go to school, a grandmother who wishes she was back in Coney Island, a grandfather who thinks he is still commanding a battleship, a mother who ran over her husband in her soft-top Spitfire and a farmhand who oozes sex from every pore mix them all up in a large, crumbling farmhouse on the Welsh border and you should get something a little like Cold Comfort Farm. Except that you don't really...Happy Accidents is set in the 1980s, the characters move to the rhythms of the Specials, Dallas is on the telly and Kate Happy's father gets run over just after they have watched Brotherhood of Man win the Eurovision. The family in Cold Comfort Farm is a collection of hilarious stereotypes but, while the inhabitants of Happy Farm have their amusing eccentricities, they live in a real world of births, death and messy sexual encounters. The reader will laugh and cry with Kate Happy as she struggles to maintain her equilibrium within her monstrously selfish family and finally finds her peace in Coney Island, her grandmother's promised land. (Kirkus UK)
Product Description
Kate Happy's favourite books are Jane Eyre and 'Salem's Lot, because they're English and American and so is she. It's the early eighties and Kate is being brought up by her grandparents on their huge sprawling farm, somewhere between England and Wales. Kate Happy's favourite books are Jane Eyre and 'Salem's Lot, because they're English and American and so is she. It's the early eighties and Kate is being brought up by her grandparents on their huge sprawling farm, somewhere between England and Wales. Gran has been homesick for Coney Island for thirty-eight years, hating her husband but determinedly donning her best pink Chanel suit and high heels to step out into the muck-splattered farmyard. Grandpa is bonkers, an ex-naval Captain who wanders round the house shouting sea-faring commands. Mum's gone AWOL since she ran over Kate's dad in her soft-top Triumph Spitfire. And are those really Dad's ashes in a Hellmann's mayonnaise jar in the attic? This is not a pastoral and isolated rural Britain. This is a time of The Specials and Ghost Town; Friday The 13th, and the riots to come. Crackling with the darkest of dark humour, brimming with crazy ancestors and closely guarded secrets, HAPPY ACCIDENTS is a wonderful first novel that confirms Tiffany Murray as a rising star of British fiction
