Sub-Rosa Reading Group: The Bloater

For the launch of the Sub-Rosa reading group our selection is The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks. The group will meet Saturday, May 4 at 6 p.m. at the store. A reminder will be sent out the day before. Books are in stock and discounted 15%.

Min works at the BBC as a sound engineer, and in theory she’s married, but her husband George is so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off even when he’s still in the room. Luckily, she has her friends and lovers to distract her: in Min’s self-lacerating, bracingly opinionated voice, life boils down to sex appeal–and of late she’s being courted by an internationally renowned opera singer whom she refers to as The Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). Disgusted by and attracted to him in equal measure, her dilemma–which reaches a hysterical, hilarious pitch–is whether to sleep with him or not.

Rosemary Tonks–the salt and pepper of the earth–is a writer who gets her claws into the reader with all the joy of a cat and a mouse. Vain and materialistic, tender and savage, narrated in brilliant, sparkling prose, The Bloater is the perfect snapshot of London in the 1960s.

“Redolent of Swinging-Sixties London, Tonks’s brilliant sex comedy reveals sobering depths beneath its flashing surface… the revival of this beguiling 1967 novel restores a truly original voice to the shelves; a must.”–David Wright Library Journal

“The Bloater delights us by its wit, relish, and new-minted metaphors.”– Daily Telegraph

Read more about Rosemary Tonks in this New Yorker article.

Rosemary Tonks (1928-2014) published two poetry collections and six novels, and wrote for The Observer, The Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Statesman, and Encounter, and presented poetry programs for the BBC.