Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

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

'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.'

At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. 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.

Tipping the Velvet is saucy, tantalising, and touching. In brief, her everywoman with a sexual difference goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement.

Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long.

480 pages. Paperback.