**A funny, touching memoir of coming of age with an absent mother in a vanished time, with five added companion stories **

The setting is Vancouver Island, the year 1960. It is the era of The Three Stooges and the Red Menace, the apex of plastic, Arborite, and everything turquoise: high heels, pedal pushers, refrigerators, even cars. Throughout her childhood, Marion Farrant heard wild family stories of the sophisticated life her mother, Nancy, led far away in Australia. Nancy's world of riches and men seemed light years away from Cordova Bay on Vancouver Island, where Marion lived with her aunt and uncle. But things changed the year she entered her teens. That year, Nancy threw everyone into a tizzy with the surprise announcement that she was coming for a visit. This second edition of Farrant's beloved memoir of her fourteenth summer, capturing a lost time and place with love and hilarity, includes five additional stories and a preface by the author. Witty, tender, and wry, My Turquoise Years is a book for anyone who remembers being a teenager.

Born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her writing has been widely anthologized in North America and has been dramatized for television; Farrant is also a frequent contributor to leading magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years, is being adapted into a stage play in conjunction with the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver; production is slated for the 2011/12 season.

Farrant has taught fiction workshops in Canada and Australia. She was a visiting writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, B.C., she has also taught part-time at the creative writing department in the University of Victoria and reviews books for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail.

Farrant’s work is infused with acerbic wit and iconoclastic innovation. As the Globe & Mail has noted, “Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer”.

BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist.”

M.A.C. Farrant's profile page