Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes'

LoveReading Says

A suitably brilliant companion to A Calamity of Mannerings, Joanna Nadin’s Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an enormously pleasurable coming-of-age page-turner that swings with the thrills of 60s Soho as it follows a year in the life of Birdy — a fabulously-conjured character who’s impossible not to love.  

As a new decade dawns on New Year’s Eve 1959, Birdy (real name Margaret) dreams of literature-related romance and glamour (think Bonjour Tristesse). Unfortunately, reality is somewhat different: “Even my name – Margaret – is average (Princess Margaret notwithstanding, as she is a goddess amongst women). Why can I not be a Calypso? A Viola? A Genevieve?”  

While Cambridge University is on the cards for Birdy, she wants “a life more like the fictional ones I keep reading about and less like the actual one I seem destined for – the dull suburbs, the safety of university in a honey-bricked city, then back to the suburbs to marry a Clive or a Colin and waste said education by having children who will repeat the process all over again.” After resolving to say ‘yes’ to everything, she befriends Charlie, a runaway aristocratic actress who secures her lodgings and a job in a Soho bookshop.  

While Birdy’s Soho adventures are a blast, and often funny as they reveal the swell of 60s liberalism, the book also explores conservative constraints of the era. In Birdy’s words: “There are some things that even today, in 1960, no matter one’s background, are considered ill behaviour: being homosexual is one, falling pregnant out of wedlock another.”  

Also brilliant on the tricky liminality of being a young adult (“I am all for being grown up, but it’s such a shame we have to leave all the childish things behind”), Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an absolute joy.

Joanne Owen

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