Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling

Crocodile Soup

Julia Darling

Dear Gert,
If you won’t write to me, then could you send me some money?
I believe you have a good job. A few hundred pounds would be helpful.
Don’t send cash, as the post often gets stolen. Send a cheque.
I am your mother.
Jean

Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. She is also estranged from her mother, Jean. As Crocodile Soup opens, she thinks she has found ‘the One’–the enigmatic Eva, who serves coffee in the cafeteria in the museum where Gert works as a curator cataloging Egyptian artifacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric childhood and her relationship with Jean through a series of vivid and surreal flashbacks.

As she revisits her past, Gert brings to life the bizarre and endearing members of her family: her obsessive twin, Frank, with whom she communicates telepathically; her father, George, who vanishes to Africa to salvage the family crocodile farm; her vain, neglectful mother, Jean; and the family ghost–a Victorian poet who haunts the attic. Gert’s story is punctuated by terse, intriguing letters from jean to which she does not respond, and ambiguous encounters with Eva.

In her struggle to come to terms with her mother, Gert opens up to Eva, and begins to understand more about her past. Is Gert destined to remain the scaffolding for those around her or will she find her savior? In a lyrical narrative studded with relentless humor and giddy self-deprecation, Julia Darling introduces an irresistible cast of characters whose shared story is unforgettable.

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