Imagine Jeanette Winterson on a good day, collaborating with Judith Butler to pen a sapphic Moll Flanders. Kerry Fried, * 'An unstoppable read, a sexy and picaresque romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaring Nineties.

Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental-and hedonistic-education had taken twice as long * * Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. We are here, she mocks, for the sake of the irregular. Kitting Nancy out in full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. And at first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending pal, all bu *Ĭlub isn't outre enough for her. * Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator-still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888-her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins. At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. Although I didn't believe the story told to me by Mother-that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch-for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love.

Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it.

Tipping the velvet author