Sophie Duffy's debut novel is The Generation Game.  This is the marvellously inventive, warm, amusing and moving account of the first forty years in the life of Philippa Smith, hapless but determined, intelligent but rash, abandoned but loved.  Told in flashback from the maternity ward where Philippa, at forty, has just become a mother, The Generation Game takes us back through a 60s and 70s childhood as we watch Philippa grow up in a world uncannily familiar to many of us.  So many of Philippa’s experiences and defining moments are echoed in our own memories, and yet her life and family is bizarrely different.  As her own real family crumbles away in betrayal she gradually acquires a new, accidental, ramshackle, loving one, populated with misfits and dreamers.  As the story of her life unfolds we come to know and love our indomitable, reckless heroine, and as the secrets of her and her family’s past slowly surface we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever in her search for happiness.

 

Sophie Duffy’s debut is a thoroughly warm-hearted novel but it has a hard edge that reminds us how frightening and desperate life can get.  As a work in progress it won Sophie the 2006 Yeovil Literary Prize.  She is a writer with a very bright future.