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  • Published: 30 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9781743483756
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Ada




Kaz Cooke invites you to an audience with the amazing Ada. She's a show girl and a story teller with a trunk full of stories and secrets. A funny, tender novel about an extraordinary woman who made the very best of everything life threw at her.

‘It’s not every day a handsome young man appears on your doorstep to ask if you’re a respectable woman…’

Miss Ada Delroy and her famous vaudeville troupe stormed five continents, enchanting royalty, miners and larrikins alike with her wit, illusions, and breathtaking dances.

‘I had a diamond pendant near as big as an emu egg off the Maharajah of What's-His-Name. They named a racehorse after me, and a pigeon and a potato soup on an Orient steamship.'

Under the costume made from 100 yards of billowing silk was a woman who couldn’t help being both fabulous and disreputable. Down on her luck in a rented room in Melbourne, morphia cocktail in hand, Ada receives a visitor. Is she ready to share her secrets?

Inspired by photos of real 1890s vaudevillians, Kaz Cooke brings to life a forgotten world of cunning clairvoyants and trained cockatoos; of fierce loyalties and mixed lollies; the glamour of the stage and the muck of the road. Funny, inventive and lovingly researched, Ada is the story of an extraordinary woman in the toughest of times, with the courage to make herself the star.

‘I’ll tell you what I loved about being a theatrical. You’re a custodian of magic, a purveyor of glamour, a repository of mystery. You’re someone.’

'I was enchanting, and indefatigable, and dainty, and all the other words they find to avoid saying 'beautiful'. The word they used the most was 'piquant'. Makes you feel like chutney.' - Ada Delroy

A former reporter and cartoonist, Kaz Cooke is the author of the bestselling books Up The Duff, Kidwrangling, Girl Stuff, Girl Stuff 8–12, Women’s Stuff, and the children's picture books Wanda Linda Goes Berserk and The Terrible Underpants, which is not entirely autobiographical. This novel grew out of her research and exhibition during a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria, 2013-2015.

  • Published: 30 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9781743483756
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Kaz Cooke

For more than 30 years, award-winning, best-selling author Kaz Cooke has been helping generations of girls and women with her practical, reassuring and fun guides to life stages.

Kaz began her career at The Age newspaper as a teenage reporter. It published her famous satirical etiquette column, 'Keep Yourself Nice', and her legendary cartoon strip 'Hermoine the Modern Girl', which also appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. Readers have enjoyed her work in Dolly magazine, The Australian, The Canberra Times, the Australian Women’s Weekly, and the Cane Toad Times (RIP), and many are familiar with her from all sorts of commercial and community radio shows.

Kaz’s book Real Gorgeous was a blockbuster in the 1990s, tackling the high-pressure ideas of body and beauty on girls and women; her collection of columns 'Living With Crazy Buttocks' won the international prize for oddest title. The original Girl Stuff book scooped the pool for its first edition, winning Australian Book Industry general non-fiction book of the year and the Australian Bookseller's Choice award.

Her other books include the meticulously researched, photo-illustrated book, You’re Doing It Wrong: A History of Bad & Bonkers Advice to Women; the historical novel based on real vaudevillians, Ada; and picture books for children, The Terrible Underpants and Wanda Linda Goes Berserk.

Up The Duff: The Real Guide to Pregnancy
, Babies & Toddlers (formerly Kidwrangling), Girl Stuff 8-12 and Girl Stuff 13+ have been updated often and are regularly still on genre best-seller lists: trusted, word-of-mouth-classics bought and gifted between generations.

Kaz lives in Melbourne where she drinks tea, talks on the phone, and can’t find her keys.

kazcooke.com.au

Also by Kaz Cooke

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Praise for Ada

Ada is absolutely compelling, complex and real! This Lady Thesp leaps off the page and stage with a brilliant turn of phrase and a fascinating life. Laugh out loud - and heartbreaking.

Gina Riley

Cooke breathes life into historical facts, creating a charming narrator in Ada and skilfully capturing the highs and lows of life on the stage for a woman in the 1890s.

Cosima McGrath, The Big Issue

Kaz Cooke's sparkling exploration of the life of Ada Delroy carries an extra charge of realism and social comment ... Ada's memories are related in a monologue full of pain, vitality, affection and wit.

Folly Gleeson, The Newtown Review of Books

Ada is absolutely compelling, complex and real! This Lady Thesp leaps off the page and stage with a brilliant turn of phrase and a fascinating life. Laugh out loud - and heartbreaking.

Gina Riley