The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. 

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young and she's in Paris.

Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he's single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted "citizens of the world"; an entanglement with a charming psychopath and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador. But an education like this doesn't come cheap.

Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence