![]() ![]() Azzopardi chills the blood with gruesome details as Frankie skins Dolores's pet rabbit for older sister Celesta's wedding dinner. Frankie's jealousy and gambling debts lead him to sell one of his daughters, Marina, to gangster Joe Medora, the man he believes is her father. ![]() When she is just a month old, Dolores loses her left hand in a fire. On the day Dolores is born, Frankie gambles away their house and caf. Hers is the perfect voice to unearth the family's confusing and shady secrets because the child doesn't quite understand the emotional impact of situations, she questions and observes with detachment. ![]() ![]() In Part One, Dolores's five-year-old narration is emotionless as she relates the awful events that shape their lives. Dolores, the youngest of the six Gauci daughters, narrates the story of her father Frankie's arrival in Tiger Bay, Wales, his marriage to young waitress Mary Jessop, the birth of their children and the family's eventual disintegration as a result of Frankie's gambling and jealousy. Physical and emotional abuse haunts every detail in Azzopardi's account of a poor Maltese immigrant family's misery. A seedy dockside community in 1960s Wales is the apt setting for this memoir-like narrative. Frank McCourt and Mary Karr may have written definitive accounts of grim childhoods, but British first novelist Azzopardi can stand on her own as a writer of remarkable sensibility and literary prowess. ![]()
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