Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

A young female artist faces poverty, sexism, and a marriage gone awry in this “tragic, comic, and completely bonkers” novel set in Depression-era London (The Observer).

“I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not to be drawn in, as I was . . . Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else.” —Maggie O'Farrell, bestselling author of Hamnet

“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.

Sophia is 21 and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.