Squandering the Blue

Perfect for fans of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, this twelve-story cycle illuminates the lives of a group of women - sober, drunk, loved, lonely, death-defying, and finally forgiving - as they live out urban fairy tales and nightmares in 80s Los Angeles. They go to AA meetings, wreck cars, agonize over Christmas shopping, write in the Hawaiian jungle, picket a nuclear installation in Nevada, tour Eastern Europe with an alienated daughter, dread cancer and being exiled by divorce to live in some shabby apartment - all vividly depicted in an almost incantatory, poetic prose, with flashes of ferocious energy, illumination and sudden grace in the darkness. 'Ms. Braverman possesses a magical, incantatory voice and the ability to loft ordinary lives into the heightened world of myth' New York Times