"This is perhaps Angela Carter's wittiest novel, an ostentatiously charming meditation on Englishness, class and Shakespeare that plays more games with twins and identity than The Comedy of Errors and has more sudden reversals of fortune than Lear. The Hazard dynasty dominates the legitimate stage, while its byblows, the narrator Dora Chance and her sister Nora, become stars of music hall and revue. This is Carter's least experimental novel, only post-modern in its insistence that the art of fiction is about fun, and about games." Amazon UK

How's about that then? This is our next book group choice. I've started to read it and, apart from loving the cheeky treatment of the Bard and those who derive their living from inhabiting his heroes (come in noble Hazards), it feels like as I'm getting to know some perverse but far more realistic cousins of Noel Streatfield's famous Fossil sisters, who like suddenly get down dirty! Yo, the Lucky Chances!

This was highly entertaining and very visually and historically atmospheric and yet somehow I was a little disappointed despite some really brilliant episodes and fabulous kick up the arse prose.

Passed on to a friend