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Other Useful Numbers (Paperback)

by Sarah Broughton (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 180 pages
  • Publisher: Parthian Books (14 Feb 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1902638506
  • ISBN-13: 978-1902638508
  • Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.8 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 761,844 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Review

dryly captures the madness and the sadness of families though this perfectly observed account --Marina Lewycka, author A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

distinctive and engaging The dialogue is really good and that's a rare thing. --Tessa Hadley

This Witty worrying debut rambles across 1980's England through various women's communities, from the terraced houses of a northern town to the communal squats of Hackney, via the muddy sleeping bags of Greenham common. Helen Sandler, Diva --Helen Sandler, Diva


Product Description

Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging on her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. In Tracy's mind if she's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work. But she is quintessentially unreliable, and it gradually becomes clear that it is Tracy's neurosis rather than Anita's disappearance that is the driving force. Set in a northern English city in the 1980's, Other Useful Numbers explores a lost community of women who are floundering in the murky waters of economic depression, infidelity and feminist politics and is in turns moving and hilarious. It's a novel about love, dependence, disappearance and recovery.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars This book followed me around!, 4 Aug 2009
Talking about intuition. This book seemed to follow me around. I'd seen it in three different libraries and was attracted to the title and the cover, but was reading other books and felt like I didn't have time for this one. Yet, every time I saw it it was screaming: "please borrow me". So despite having other books to read I read the first page of "Other useful numbers" and was hooked. I put all my other books aside.

I can't point at what it is. It's not written in a particular style, yet it feels very stylish and well crafted. I've always been a big fan of first person present tense. It's not only the narrator that's fascinating; all characters are believable and have their own quirkiness.

The reader gets to follow Tracy from lover to lover from job to job in an endless attempt trying to find Anita - her great love who left her. But to me it's more an unravelling tale about Tracy's childhood secrets and the effect they have on her. She seems extremely lost and it feels like you get a satisfactory reason why. It's not really about Anita after all ...

It's interesting that the book deals with lesbian relationships, but is not marketed as a book for lesbians. I like that there are no big explanations about coming out or struggling with your sexuality. It's a relevant read whatever your sexuality is.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Other Useful Accounts of the Times, 11 Jun 2008
By Anita N. Pilgrim (Cardiff Wales) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Other Useful Numbers is an accomplished piece of writing and feminism which brought vividly back the 1980s for me, a time when I was a bewildered student. It's a great skill to be able to draw an unsympathetic character like Tracy and get the reader to be on her side. The characterisation rings true on many levels, such as her relationship with her friend Mike: typical of the kind of relationship which can spring up between shy people who have nothing in common except that they don't have anything in common with anyone-else.

I found it hugely comforting realising what a destabilising time the 1980s were. I remember feeling confused about who I was and where I should be going for over a decade in the 80s and 90s. Reading Other Useful Numbers made me realise that wasn't about my own limitations but about the nature of the time. A time of great strides in feminist practice, and yet a woman prime minister like Thatcher. A time of expanding lesbian and gay communities, and yet repressive legislation and reactionary institutional response. The economic vagaries of the time meant there were no assured pathways in life, just a general imperative to get a better job than your parents had expected for themselves with fewer jobs around.

There is a visit in the book to Greenham Common, where I remember going once with a friend. We went to visit another college friend who lived nearby, when we got there he was really pleased to see us but then there was a strange wait on the doorstep and he came back and said with great embarrassment that his mother wouldn't have us in the house because we were Greenham women!

I felt it was a great achievement, to encapsulate that time in one novel and one character like this, I've never read a book which made me understand the 1980s and myself as someone of those times so well.
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5.0 out of 5 stars refreshingly different, 30 Jan 2008
What I loved about this book was the way the writing conveyed such clear images - without being literal. The characters made me laugh out loud. Sarah Broughton captures the spirit of the '80's from a very particular point of view. Does anyone remember the enterprise allowance scheme?
A moving read - at turns funny and sad.
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