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 naïve 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.

• The Vet's Daughter (New York Review Books Classics)
• The Juniper Tree (New York Review Books Classics)
• The Velveteen Daughter: A Novel
• Sisters by a river
• The Shadow Land: A Novel
• Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
• Saints for All Occasions: A novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
• Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
• Sky Girls: The True Story of the First Women's Cross-Country Air Race
• Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, a Memoir