Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.
You might even have already read it - it's been 50 years in June since it was first published, and Virago is celebrating its era-defining and record-breaking brilliance with a special anniversary edition, complete with a brand new cover and pink-edged pages. If you haven’t read it, we want you to discover it!
And because Valley of the Dolls is 50, we feel we should be celebrating in style – so we’re planning a blog tour that says both happy birthday and happy publication day to a book we think – and hopefully you will too – is very special indeed.
If you've read it, you'll know its fun, fabulous, flirty, and frank; there's sex, there's drugs and there's show business. It's SERIOUSLY girly - long before Sex and the City and Girls, Valley of the Dolls held the world rapt with its tales of the private passions of Hollywood starlets.
Dolls - red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight. For Anne, Neely and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three beautiful women become best friends when they are young and in New York, struggling to make their names in the entertainment industry. Only when they reach the peak of their careers do they find there's nowhere left to go but down - to the Valley of the Dolls.
Back in 1966 it sat at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list for an unprecedented 28 weeks. As a work of fiction, it tackled issues such as gay rights, women's rights and drug addiction, and since then has inspired the likes of Gloria Steinem and Lena Dunham, going on to sell over 40 million copies in 30 languages - proof enough that it's as loved in 2016 as it was in the swinging 60s.
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