My Little Blue Dress

From the moment you meet our heroine as she recalls her rural childhood and struggles with the world around her, you know something is amiss. Just as you begin to suspect that the author of this "memoir" knows A) next to nothing about rural England at the turn of the century, and B) nothing at all about women, you discover the root cause of the heroine's difficulties is that this "memoir" is actually being improvised at breakneck speed by a young man named Bruno Maddox in a single night. Typing frantically, Bruno struggles to keep his narrative sounding plausible, but as dawn approaches and exhaustion takes hold he is forced to confront the obvious: that his threadbare, TV-taught understanding of world history is entirely to blame for the debilitating holes in his personality. A novel that begins like a turn of the century Judy Blume coming-of-age story turns into a harrowing, brutal satire of the New York media scene, a candid generational cri de coeur, a murder mystery, and, in fact, a love story.How this young man found himself in such a ludicrous predicament, why he's so desperate to finish before morning, who has put him up to this challenge, and why he undertakes it, are just some of the ingenious surprises in this hugely entertaining, brilliantly conceived satire.