Diamonds at the Lost and Found

A great read – what a strange and amazing life! The tone was pitched just right, unflinchingly, but with so much love, and after reading it I felt that maybe I understood something more about the world of women’ Louis Theroux

‘A delicious memoir with echoes of An Education by Lynn Barber and Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky … a warm and consistently entertaining portrait of a hapless but loving mother. You’ll find yourself wishing you could have met her in person’ Daily Express

‘Wry and warm: I went from gripped to moved and tearful and I’d now like to read a hundred more books by this gifted, vivid storyteller’ Marian Keyes

‘Flies off the page like uncorked champagne, with characters written so winningly that I feel I am in the room with them. Magnetic, enchanting and true: it’s utterly irresistible’ Joanna Lumley

‘It’s a story of how a mothers passes onto her daughter the greatest gift of all – a passion for life! Like everyone who reads it I wish I had met Audrey just once!’ John Bishop

‘Never dull, regularly embarrassing, often poignant, and beautifully observed. A go-getting, polished jewel of a book’ Keggie Carew, author Dadland

‘Everyone has a mother but not everyone’s mother is like Audrey. I found myself completely immersed in the incredibly vivid world of this memoir and was sad to leave it behind’ Kate Atkinson

‘… Aspinall elevates her familial memories from the personal into something more: a kind of social history, taking in grey, postwar Britain, Technicolor America, the Swinging Sixties and seedy Seventies. A documentary-maker, she injects the book with a cinematic quality’ The Times

‘Just when you thought your family was offbeat, here comes Fabulous Audrey. A portrait of dauntless spirit, this is what happens when your skeletons stay out of the closet and take you dancing’ DBC Pierre, author of Breakfast with the Borgias

Sarah Aspinall is a producer and documentary maker. She has four children and lives with her partner in London and on the South coast.