Excess Baggage [Paperback]

Judy Astley's Excess Baggage defies categorisation. Is it a literary piece? Or a very funny and sharply written comic novel? Actually, Astley writes the kind of book that creates its own category, as anyone who has read Just for the Summer, Pleasant Vices and Every Good Girl will know all too well. Excess Baggage is quite her most beguiling novel yet, with a range of characterisation and hilarious situations that top even her previous books.

Astley's heroine, Lucy, is dreading the "Proper Family Holiday" that is in prospect. She has been struggling as a house painter with an uneventful love life and a 12-year-old daughter when her parents suggest that she forgets about the expired lease on her flat and joins them (along with her surly sister Theresa and vaguely paranoid brother Simon) on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. For this, the siblings have been told to bring along children and even au pairs. But what is their parents' agenda? Quickly, the tensions that divide the family at home come bubbling to the surface and, in the course of some fraught situations, Lucy's life is not the only one to be changed irrevocably.

From the opening chapter when Lucy staggers blearily around to the Beatles on the radio (as she stuffs clothes into her hideous puce nylon hold-all) to the brilliantly orchestrated finale featuring (of all things) a hurricane, Astley rarely puts a foot wrong. The reader does not have to be a single mother to identify totally with the beleaguered Lucy, and her squabbling family are equally engaging, however horrible. However, it's Astley's authorial voice that is always sure-footed, such as the passage with Lucy's brother Simon remembering sex in odd places:

...there'd been the boat on the Norfolk Broads, holidaying with Plum's hearty outdoor cousins who were so scrubbed-clean wholesome that Simon had been sure they thought babies were made by some strange practical handicraft as per instructions in a scout manual. It had been almost disappointing to get married and realise that sex was not only permitted but compulsory, and in a safe dull duveted bed.

--Barry Forshaw

A family holiday in the sunny Caribbean turns into more of a torment than a treat.

A Proper Family Holiday was the last thing Lucy was expecting to have. But as a penniless and partnerless house-painter with an expired lease on her flat and a twelve-year-old daughter, she could hardly turn down her parents' offer to take them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. She'd just have to put up with her sister Theresa (making no secret of preferring Tuscany as a holiday destination) and brother Simon (worrying that there might be some sinister agenda behind their parents' wish to take them all away) with their various spouses, teenagers, young children and au pair. In a luxury hotel, with bright sunshine, swimming, diving, glorious food and friendly locals, any family tensions should have melted away in the fabulous heat. The children should have been angelic, the teenagers cheerful, the adults relaxed and happy. But…some problems just refuse to be left at home.

A Proper Family Holiday was the last thing Lucy was expecting to have. But as a penniless and partnerless house-painter with an expired lease on her flat and a twelve-year-old daughter, she could hardly turn down her parents' offer to take them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. She'd just have to put up with her sister Theresa (making no secret of preferring Tuscany as a holiday destination) and brother Simon (worrying that there might be some sinister agenda behind their parents' wish to take them all away) with their various spouses, teenagers, young children and au pair. In a luxury hotel, with bright sunshine, swimming, diving, glorious food and friendly locals, any family tensions should have melted away in the fabulous heat. The children should have been angelic, the teenagers cheerful, the adults relaxed and happy. But…some problems just refuse to be left at home.

Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career: secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when she’d have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for the Summer. She has now had eleven novels published by Black Swan.