Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

I told Helen my story and she went home and cried. So begins "Our Spoons Came from Woolworths." But Barbara Comyns s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.
Sophia is twenty-one and naive when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn t make up for her husband s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around."