Hideous Kinky

£7.99

In Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, two little girls are taken by their feckless young mother to Morocco on a '60s pilgrimage of self-discovery. And while she immerses herself in the Sufi religion, her children seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands? Bea insists on going to school while the five-year-old narrator dreams of mashed potato.

The girl's explorations and discoveries of Marrakech vividly describe the sights, smells and sounds of Morocco. Their perception and understanding of the different culture, local rituals and customs, diverging from their mother's quest for personal fulfilment and flight from the grinding conventions of English life.

Esther Freud's vocabulary and tone veer easily from the childlike to the more sophisticated, particularly when she recounts speeches or circumstances beyond a child's comprehension, and she escapes sentimentality through simplicity. Hideous Kinky is a cheerful autobiographical novel as much about family as about an exotic country seen through an innocent's eyes. And while the author may not have invented her subject, she has re-created it with a light touch and delicate irony.