INTRODUCTION

What is to be done when your thesis is long overdue, your son has run away from home and even retreating to a remote holiday cottage in Cornwall with a mother adept at absorbing (or is it attracting) problems has not brought the required peace and quiet? For Sally Fry, the harassed heroine of this unusual first novel, the answer is to write her Complete Knowledge: bits and pieces of random, although strictly alphabetical, information which will, she hopes, clarify and make sense of her haphazard life. But the personal dictionary, far from clearing her mind for more serious work, increasingly comes to reflect the hilarious and often outrageous events which overtake her through the eventful summer.

First of all, Sally and her mother are joined by two of her sister Kate's children (listed under baggage), whilst Kate goes into hospital for an emergency operation. Kate herself follows to recuperate with the other three (cave), as does Julia, Sally's other sister, hotfoot and cold-hearted from Uppsala where she has left her Swedish husband Sven (desolate). Then Sven arrives (film) and Randy Andy, Kate's husband, home from selling lawnmowers in Paris, literally drops in (helicopter). But for Sally this extending family and their attendant problems are mere distractions compared to the mysterious disappearance of her teenage son Sebastian (whom we meet, variously, under abacus - he swallowed the brightly-coloured beads when a small child - baffle and bastard).

How the problems of family and neigh­bour are satisfactorily resolved, how Sebastian and his mother are reunited and how Sally comes through with triumphant success (and a finished thesis) are all contained in her immensely funny, very perceptive and hugely enjoyable Complete Knowledge.