The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge, Hachette, $29.99.
This is the novel British author Beryl Bainbridge was writing in the last decade of her life and right up to the moment she died in July last year.
At her bedside was Brendan King, who had edited many of her 17 novels and between them they devised a way of finishing the novel should she run out of time.
Bainbridge did lose her battle and the final pages were put together posthumously by King.
It’s a notably short novel for 10 years of work, but incredibly precise and layered, mixing elements of Bainbridge’s own life — her road-trip across America — with a thriller structure that tingles with menace.
Rose, an awkward and rather ordinary English woman, goes to America in the summer of 1968 to meet Harold, a lugubrious and rather disquieting American, to search for the man who inspired her life and, as we later discover, destroyed his.
As the pair cross-cross the States in a camper van meeting a bizarre ragtag of acquaintances, we come closer to the enigmatic Dr Wheeler and a pivotal moment in US history — the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in an LA hotel kitchen.
The narrative is typically dark and at times a little hard to follow, but filled with fascinating, well-observed characters.
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