It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle

Summary

Fifty years after its first publication, discover the classic coming-of-age novel that confronts prejudice and injustice with power and humanity.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RITA MAE BROWN

Molly Bolt is a young lady with a big character. Beautiful, funny and bright, Molly figures out at a young age that she will have to be tough to stay true to herself in 1950s America. In her dealings with boyfriends and girlfriends, in the rocky relationship with her mother and in her determination to pursue her career, she will fight for her right to happiness. Charming, proud and inspiring, Molly is the girl who refuses to be put in a box.

Reviews

  • Molly is as vivid and funny as Huckleberry Finn. Back in the late 1970s everyone in the Women's Collective at uni had read Rubyfruit, which is why Rita in Educating Rita is so named. It provoked snobbery then, and probably still now: a book that makes you laugh so much cannot be serious literature. But Rubyfruit has a lot of serious points to make and is great fun along the way
    Guardian

About the author

Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mrs. Murphy mystery series (which she writes with her tiger cat, Sneaky Pie) and the Sister Jane novels, as well as Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, The Six of One Trilogy, and The Sand Castle, among others, and of the memoirs Animal Magnetism and Rita Will. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia, with cats, hounds, horses, and big red foxes.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more