num_pages: 400
description: AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALMavis Gallants novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy A Fairly Good Time  here with Green Water Green Sky  encapsulates Gallants unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (ne Norrington then briefly Higgins) the heroine of A Fairly Good Time  is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians this young widowrecently remarried to a French journalist named Philippeis fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirleys life begin to recedePhilippe having apparently though not definitively lefther freewheeling makeshift and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water Green Sky  Gallants first novel is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy an American divorce and her daughter Flor. Uprooted and unmoored mother and daughter live like itinerantsin Venice Cannes and Parisglamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.
language: English
title: A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky
publisher: NYRB Classics