Bilgewater cover art

Bilgewater

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Bilgewater

By: Jane Gardam
Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
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About this listen

Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

©1976 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Contemporary Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction

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All stars
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Funny, charming and poignant, this story was totally absorbing. The characters are quirky and believable, and at the end it felt like leaving friends. Narration was absolute perfection.

Wonderful in every way

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Beautifully written, as you would expect from Jane Gardam, and beautifully read. I wept at the end. And wanted to go back and begin again.

Loved it! Missing all the characters now

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A charming and engaging tale that is very well read and a good choice to hear aloud.

Charming and engaging.

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Nothing to dislike . It was compelling and gripping for every second. The narrator was superb. Could not fault her voices .

Extraordinary plot and characterisation. Hugely enjoyable variety of voices throughout. Absolutely brilliant

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I loved the people, the setting, the detail, and the plot. Jane Gardam has such a skill in creating credible and likeable characters. I also felt I was in the book too and things were happening to me.

Such an original story

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