The extraordinary and unconventional life of a modern teenage bohemian. 'I am Cat Balou, I am Jeanne Moreau, I am Modigliani's lover, but not the one who threw herself out of the window!' Una is a sixteen year old sexual fantasist. In 1989 she is a kept woman in Paris, whose romantic ideas about the lifestyle of a mistress to an aging record producer don't quite live up to the reality. She searches for an affair that corresponds to her dreams, but finds herself flitting from one romantic infatuation to another, obsessed by the idea of sex but careful of her virginity. From her borrowed studio in Pigalle she explores a bohemian Paris full of unpredictable characters: her Caribbean neighbour Henri, who creeps in naked to use her shower when she's out; her friends Ines the stripper and Marcus, who help her scrape an existence of Burger Kings and Gauloises. La Dolce Vita is hot on her heels, from the pretentious prince who woos her to the transvestite prostitute who chases her. As Una drifts through a year in her life, she is carried from Paris to a wintry Prague on the verge of revolution, to her rambling family home in rural Italy and to a shocking pre-honeymoon in Brazil. Una's voyage is a rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood. Like most journeys, it involves danger and discovery. Dolce Vita, with its cocktail of fantasy, innocence and worldliness, introduces a strong and unusual new voice in British fiction. / Based on Iseult Teran's own life / Iseult Teran is the daughter of Lisa St Aubin de Teran and her aristocratic Venezualan first husband / A phenomenally publicisable author who gathered great reviews for HB / Dolce Vita is a cross between Esther Freud's Peerless Flats and Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, with a touch of Isabel Allende thrown in / A fantastic young woman's read -- Iseult's life is emblematic of womanhood, and glamorous with it
Iseult Teran was born in Venezuela in 1973. She has been an actress, model and the wife of film director Michael Radford (Il Postino). She has a son, Felix, who is nine, and now lives in London.
'Like a trunk full of exotic jewels... Dolce Vita is charming, seductive and somehow redolent of a more gracious age. Una, the sixteen-year-old heroine, is living it up in Paris at the end of the 1980s. The mistress of an ageing record producer, she is pursued at every turn by unsuitable sexual possiblities. On a permanent quest for romantic love and food, she finds little of either, living almost entirely on Gauloise cigarettes and Burger King meals while making lists of luxuries she can't afford... Irresistible' Marie Claire Book of the Month 'Una is a striking heroine: a teenage nymphet who could out-flirt Lolita, living a life that is movie-star glamorous in a garret in Paris... Graceful, elegant and deeply seductive, Teran's debut is as delicious and decadent as the film from which its name is taken' The Times 'Throughout this light-hearted and often very funny tale, Una remains a frank confessor who is strangely elusive. The charm of Dolce Vita derives not only from the endeavours of the fickle heroine to make sense of a mass of internal contradictions, but also from the self-deprecating tone in which she recounts these expoits. The result is spirited fiction which... consistently entertains' Times Literary Supplement
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