BRIDE OF CATASTROPHE, THE

Barbed, brilliant and brittle novel -- a coming-out tale in reverse In the author's own words: 'The Bride of Catastrophe' is a comedy that follows the fortunes of Beatrice Wolfe, a 'feral child' raised in a peculiar, isolated family and loosed onto an unsuspecting world at Sweetriver College, where she falls under the spell of her tutor, an energetic, exuberant, lesbian iconoclast called Philippa Sayres. After graduation, the novel follows Beatrice's odyssey into Real Life as she tries, valiantly, earnestly, ridiculously to make conventional and meaningful progress. She spends almost the whole of the book insisting she'sa lesbian, though everyone from her parents to her female lovers to the man she unwittingly adores can see she's wrong. But then she's not used to being wrong -- she has long since been the grown-up in her troubled family. She's a latterday Emma who snaps her book smartly shut and thinks with satisfaction "Now I know how love progresses." Of course she has a whole education coming...' So, a picaresque, a bildungsroman -- but whichever way you look at it, a hugely entertaining and tender comic novel.