About The Book
Now recognized as one of this century’s leading British writers, Joe Orton shot to fame on the strength of vicious dramatic farces like Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Written in 1957 and discovered thirty years after his death, Between Us Girls, his first solo work after years of collaborating on “unpublishable” novels with his lover Kenneth Halliwell, represents the turning point in Orton’s career. This is a comic novel, the diary of a young would-be actress named Susan Hope, whose picaresque adventures lead her from life on the London stage to imprisonment in the white slave trade of Mexico, and ultimately to film stardom in Hollywood. An extraordinary blend of camp comedy and pent-up eroticism, it is the first appearance of the unique voice of a writer whose plays would later achieve worldwide acclaim.
Praise
“The sudden appearance, from a void of four decades, of three previously unpublished works by the late British playwright Joe Orton is a cultural event of the first magnitude. . . . Between Us Girls. . .is the work of a master; a comic novel comparable to the best of E. F. Benson and Ronald Firbank. . . . The time to redress the record has at last arrived.” –David Ehrenstein, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.” –The Observer
“Orton had mastered the art of packing more polished gems of genuine wit into one fleeting exchange than any other writer of his age, or since. . . . [He] is Wilde on speed, Coward on cocaine, Sheridan on a trip.” –Daily Mail
“Joe Orton was a writer we could ill afford to lose. Many of the taboo-breaking excesses of the sixties now seem merely silly. Orton, like the songs of The Beatles, has triumphantly survived the test of time.” –Daily Telegraph
Grove Press
