Through its ambitious structure, the novel also charts five generations and more than a century of Ruby's family history, as reported in ``footnotes'' that follow relevant chapters. Ruby has two older sisters, willful Gillian and melancholy Patricia. Her parents own a pet shop her mother, Bunty, bitterly rues having married her philandering husband, George, and daydreams about what her life might have been. Ruby Lennox is a quirky, complex character who relates the events of her life and those of her dysfunctional family with equal parts humor, fervor and candor-starting with her moment of conception in York, England, in 1959: ``I exist!'' Ruby then describes the family she is to join. The narrator's insistent voice and breezy delivery animates this enchanting first novel by a British writer who won one of the 1993 Ian St.
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