REVIEWS OF THE COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF SALLY FRY

EVENING STANDARD

Muddling through A to Z
THE COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF SALLY FRY
by Sylvia Murphy
(Gollancz, £9.95)

SALLY FRY has the bright Idea that compiling an alphabetic encyclopedia of everything one knows - a Complete Knowledge - might be a useful form of therapy.

She starts to write it while staying in a rented cottage in Cornwall with her dauntingly competent mother in order to work on her belated PhD thesis in peace and quiet. Peace and quiet is exactly what she doesn't get, as she and her mother cope with a cumulative family invasion - Sally's two sisters, their respective problems, husbands and children, and Sally's drug addict son Sebastian with his disabled girlfriend.

A merry but somewhat pre-posterous story unfolds, as the children disappear into an Enid Blyton - style holiday adventure and the adults muddle their way through a series of equally absurd entanglements with the vil­lagers. The novel teeters on the edge of banality. What saves it, and makes it such fun to read, is the way that the story of the summer and of Sally's past life are revealed through the strictly alphabetical entries of her Complete Knowledge.

The bitterness with which Sally Fry looks back on her struggles to bring up the illegitimate Sebastian acts as an antidote to the ludicrous goings-on in Cornwall. If the humour is at times infantile, it is also fresh and unpretentious, and it all adds up to a clever and immensely likeable

Alannah Hopkin

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Reviewed by Susan Hill

You should have absolutely no difficulty in laughing aloud at The Complete Knowledge of Sally Fry by Sylvia Murphy (Gollancz, £9.95) and it's a joy to find a new original comic writer - a thing I haven't done since I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, written by Sue Townsend.

Sylvia Murphy has found a highly novel format too; her narrator. Sally, writes her book in alphabetical order, taking, bits of fact and fancy, and weaving them into a story - it's not so confusing as it sounds! She is spending the summer in her mother's quiet house in Cornwall, to finish a sociological thesis undisturbed. Ha! The rest of her crazy, mixed-up family descend, and chaos reigns during a heatwave. Tremendous fun.