LOOKING FOR ANDREW MCCARTHY - Softcover

Colgan, Jenny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007105533 ISBN 13: 9780007105533

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2011

Synopsis

The third novel by the Sunday times bestselling author of Amanda’s Wedding

'I'm wearing a beautiful pink dress, and I'm in a big pink room with billowing curtains...and I'm dancing to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark...and my handsome partner leans over and whispers...

'Yes, 80s child Ellie really thought life was going to be like Pretty in Pink, St Elmo's Fire and all those other movies – where everyone was astoundingly glamorous, popular, successful, had huge apartments and lived happily ever after. But now that she and her gang are thirty, she has to admit that things haven't quite turned out that way. When did horrible flats, difficult relationships and menaningless jobs take over?And, more importantly, what happened to the coolest, wisest, most inspirational Brat Packer of them all? Where is Andrew McCarthy now? Did life fulfil its promise for him? Is he happy on Channel 5? Surely he, of all people, can tell Ellie what to do about her thirty-angst?

Determined to get her idol to unravel some of life's great mysteries, Ellie sets out, unwillingly accompanied by her best friend Julia, on a quest across the USA, from LA to New York to find him. It's an unlikely epic, by turns hilarious, romantic and downright uncomfortable – but, helped by a cast of thousands, of whom Frosty the Giant Pig is probably the least improbable, they do find some answers, although not the ones they expected

About this title

Review:

Travelling East across the United States in a silver Thunderbird, Ellie Eversholt is a woman on a mission. She's Looking for Andrew McCarthy, and hoping that when she finds him she can ask him a few pertinent questions, such as why, at the grand old age of 30, life hasn't turned out the way it was portrayed in the Brat Pack films of the 1980s.

Feeling misled by the glittering façade presented to her in the dimly-lit cinemas of her teenage years, bored with her career, fed-up with her failing love life and ashamed that at 30 she's still renting a room in a flat owned by Big Bastard, the Neanderthal flatmate-from-hell, Ellie needs some answers--and she needs them now. Gathering up a group of similarly disillusioned friends, Ellie makes her way to America, and together they set off, Thelma and Louise-style (except without the cliff-ending suicide pact) to criss-cross America in search of 80s screen idol Andrew McCarthy. In a tale which explores every avenue of the old saying "it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive", Ellie and friends on both sides of the Atlantic share in the joys and disappointments of her quest: a journey which takes her to the four corners of the States and brings her into contact with a variety of outrageous characters, ranging from hunky tanned scriptwriters to six foot tall transvestites and even Frosty II, the world's largest pig.

Does she find the real Andrew McCarthy? And will she ever come to terms with why she hasn't spent her life living in a huge apartment with billowing curtains, wearing a big pink dress and being dated by a succession of handsome men, like a modern-day Molly Ringwald? --Emily Lowson

Review:

'Colgan is on top form with this, her latest outrageous romp' Cosmopolitan

'Wonderful, warm and resonant for anyone who ever wondered what happened to teenage dreams' Hello!

'Jenny Colgan is one of the leaders of the pack and this, her third novel, will delight her legion of admirers...Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well-observed, it reads like a pastiche of the movies she loved...If a time capsule were buried to capture the world at the turn of the 21st century, this would be a candidate for inclusion' Daily Mail

'Did I like this book? Well, d'uh! Do hedgehogs have quills? A pure belter of a novel' Glasgow Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007105533
• ISBN 13: 9780007105533
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 403