Letty Fox: Her Luck

By Christina Stead and Tim Parks

'Letty Fox: Her Luck is a fully achieved comic novel of a most original kind' ANGELA CARTER.

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.

Letty Fox is hunting for a husband. Her picaresque adventures are brilliantly described in this imaginative portrayal of a woman who might have been independent, but chose otherwise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apollo Library
• Release date: May 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786691385

Christina Stead

Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.

Reviews for Letty Fox

[ifjuly · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

people talk about how christina stead's great weakness is not knowing what to edit/weed out. and it's true, sure, but i dunno...i kinda like that. it makes her lengthy detailed repetitive books of female domestic and familial experience feel more authentic and less literary, in a way i enjoy. like you're at the kitchen table reading the unexpurgated letters from your batty aunt who doesn't know the meaning of discretion, or something. "fun."

[encephalical · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I almost gave up on this book. I loved the first couple of chapters, I loved the last few chapters. It's the three dozen or so in the middle that just become a slog, but then the effect of the ending would have bee lost without them.