Behind the scenes at the museum
By: Kate Atkinson.
Edition: 1st U.S. ed.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 332
Subjects: Women -- England -- Fiction; Yorkshire (England) -- Fiction
Description: In her profoundly moving, uniquely comic debut, Kate Atkinson introduces readers to the mind and world of Ruby Lennox, born above a pet shop in York at the halfway point of the twentieth century, and determined to understand both the family that precedes her and the life that awaits her.

Taking her own conception as her starting point, the irrepressible Ruby narrates a story of four generations of women, from her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer, to her mother's unfulfilled dreams of Hollywood glamour, to her young sister's efforts to upstage the Queen on Coronation Day. Hurtling in and out of both World Wars, economic downfalls, the onset of the permissive '60s, and up to the present day, Ruby paints a rich and vivid portrait of family heartbreak and happiness.