Longlisted for the 1999 Women's Prize for Fiction
Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. She is also estranged from her mother. As Crocodile Soup opens, she thinks she has found “the One” — the enigmatic Eva, who serves coffee at the cafeteria in the museum where Gert works as a curator cataloging Egyptian artifacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric, childhood through a series of vivid and surreal flashbacks: her obsessive twin, Frank, with whom she communicates telepathically; her father, George, who vanished to Africa to salvage the family crocodile farm; her vain, neglectful mother, Jean; and the family ghost — a Victorian poet who haunts the attic.
