Dr Joanna Nadin is the author of more than 90 books for children, teenagers and adults, including the Sunday Times-bestselling series The Worst Class in the World, and the Carnegie-nominated Joe All Alone, which is now a BAFTA-winning and Emmy-nominated BBC drama. She is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol and lives in Bath.
Birdy Arbuthnot’s Year of "Yes" follows 18-year-old Margaret "Birdy" Arbuthnot from Surbiton to Soho in 1960, on her quest for a life less ordinary, and more like one in the novels she reads. It’s a companion novel to the Carnegie-nominated A Calamity of Mannerings, which was also a Sunday Times Book of the Week. The cover is by Anna Morrison, who also designed Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren.
1960 is knocking on the door, and eighteen-year-old Margaret "Birdy" Arbuthnot, presently of Surbiton, wants more than her current existence in the dull suburbs. She wants to LIVE – in capital letters! Could Soho, with its bright lights and dark corridors, hold the key to a life more novel-like and less … Surrey? (Even if Mummy thinks it is a square mile of vice, full of men with overly shiny shoes).
At the cusp of the new year, Birdy resolves to only say "yes" to everything for the next twelve months. She can’t possibly realise that her biggest "yes" will launch her directly into the London orbit of the aristocratic Mannering family, and transform her life into one worth writing novels about.
From Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of "Yes"
DECEMBER 1959
Saturday 26th December
11 a.m.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Or, rather, I tried to, but the sink is perilously small and slippery, the ceramic draining board is horribly cold, and I was just wondering whether or not to run the hot water lest I get chilblains when my mother walked in. She said at eighteen it was high time I grew out of all that "Cassandra Mortmain nonsense" and in any case she needed it for scrubbing potatoes as Aunt Barbara (ambitious, bunions) and Uncle Roy (obsessed with war and golf) are coming for lunch, so please go and do whatever it is I was doing in somewhere more suitable, i.e. the dining room. I was about to point out that I am barred from the dining room (for reasons I cannot be bothered to explain here but suffice to say I vehemently disagree with) but I could tell she was in no mood to brook argument (her lips go inexplicably thin) so I have come upstairs to my bedroom and she has gone back to doing something inventive with mince.
So, in actuality, I write this sitting on lavender candlewick, whilst wishing, yet again, that my life were more novel-like. I shouldn’t even mind if it wasn’t I Capture the Castle, however attractive moving to a dilapidated mansion in East Anglia might be; I’d settle for anything disaffected and preferably French – like Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse, perhaps. Sadly there is no chance of torrid poolside affairs in Surbiton, where private swimming pools and disaffection are regarded with the same suspicion as are exotic pets and ambitious hair. Instead I am constrained by complete mediocrity. Even my name – Margaret – is average (Princess Margaret notwithstanding, as she is a goddess amongst women). Why can I not be a Calypso? A Viola? A Genevieve?
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