The paperback edition of Julia's novel was published on June 3rd 2004, as a Penguin paperback. The hardback edition, which was published on August 7th 2003 by Viking Books, drew widespread praise, including "Inventive and quirky, charming and original. A delight." from The Observer.
From Thursday 12 to Saturday 14 March, Live Theatre in Newcastle will feature some of their most familiar faces in a staged adaptation of The Taxi Driver’s Daughter (2003).
Julia recorded a short promotional video for the Meet the Author website, which you can view on the screen to the left. (If that does not play, alternative versions on the Meet the Author website may work better.)
In a new review in The Guardian on 3 July 2004, David Jays wrote:
From the first line ("Mac drives like a man in a pot of treacle"), Darling writes with snap and crackle, and holds all these disgruntled characters in the frame. Teenage Caris is the novel's stroppy centre: morose, humiliated and fuming. Darling's dialogue is nicely acrimonious, and if the story zips past, Mac reminds us: "That's the trouble with the nice fares: you have to cut the conversations short."
In a piece on its Literary Review pages, Private Eye turned a piece on the 2004 Hay Literary Festival into a tour de l'horizon of the British literary scene and concluded "British fiction's real blood transfusion in recent years has come courtesy of the new English regionalism. Anyone who wants to see what local writing has been up to in the bleak territory beneath that New York/London/Bombay suspension bridge should check out Carol Birch's Turn Again Home (Virago £6.99) and Julia Darling's The Taxi Driver's Daughter (Penguin £6.99). Never mind that it suits London medialand and travelling literary princes to pretend otherwise."
It was a runner-up in the 2004 Encore Award, a prize of £10,000 for the best published second novel of the year, awarded by The Society of Authors. Earlier, it made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction but, along with a number of other highly acclaimed books, failed to make the shortlist. Meanwhile ...
It's nearly Christmas, and Caris is trying to make the angel stand up straight on the tree just as her father, Mac, is edging his taxi through the crowds in Newcastle's streets. His wife, meanwhile, is at the police station, accused of stealing a shoe from Fenwick's department store.
In the inimitable voice that has brought her so many fans, Julia Darling tells the story of a family on the verge of collapse, caught between the escape they crave and the imperfect reality that seems to be their lot. Click to read an extract - the novel's fourth chapter.
Julia worked with Newcastle's Live Theatre to develop it as a stage play. A read-through on 16 June offered the audience a fascinating opportunity to see the process by which a novel may be transformed into a play. Julia admitted that there is a considerable challenge in taking a book where the characters are inarticulate, and making it into a play where everything has to be conveyed by dialogue and stage directions, especially as she wanted to avoid the use of monologues. Some of the dialogues we heard, particularly between characters who were trying to avoid saying what they meant, were spot on and very sharp. But at this stage there was still a considerable degree of narration, so there is still some way to go yet.
The Taxi Driver's Daughter is also being published in other lands: Canada is the latest to sign up. The ISBN is 978-0-14-301727-1. Here are some reviews (where there's a link, click it for the full review, on the paper's own website):
Geraldine Bedell, writing in The Observer, said: "Julia Darling's writing is so inventive and quirky that this slender material becomes a delight, charming and original. From the first sentence - 'Mac drives like a man in a pot of treacle' - you can tell you're in the hands of someone with a sharp eye for the strange, tangential detail that makes the picture."
The New Statesman made it their novel of the week. Helena Echlin said: "The Taxi Driver's Daughter is a better book than Darling's first novel, Crocodile Soup, the surreal story of a loveless woman meditating on her unhappy childhood. Darling sheds her sequined style, and all that remains of her surrealism is the shoe tree. She still allows herself the off lyrical image (a broken heel hangs 'like a child's milk tooth'), but her writing is less showy. Poetry is no longer Darling's priority. Her prose is looser and more accommodating, and her characters are more complicated."
(Access to the full review on the New Statesman website is a chargeable service.)
Alfred Hickling, writing in The Guardian, enjoyed the novel, concluding "The irony is that Tyneside has a deep and distinguished literary heritage which long predates its new-found fascination with the visual arts. Darling should be prized for belonging to that tradition, rather than marginalised as a provincial novelist. The Taxi Driver's Daughter proves that Darling is not a talented Newcastle writer, but a bleakly hilarious social commentator who happens to live in Newcastle."
In her review in The Leeds Guide (August 13), Sarah Book said:"This is a book of oppositions; stifling domesticity and great freedom, dreams and mundanity, the crush of family ties and the security of kin. The most dazzling quality of The Taxi Driver's Daughter is how Julia Darling manages to portray the inner life of very ordinary people. The intensity and vivacity of Caris's thoughts are spellbinding; she is astute, witty and imaginative. Externally, she is a fifteen year-old truant with not much hope of a promising future, but Darling shows us the rest of her that is hidden away inside her head. In fact, all of the characters in the novel have this wonderful hidden interior life that is brought out exquisitely. This is a cracking story, which is funny and down-to-earth in its observations and a joy to read."
Laura Baggaley concluded her review in the Times Literary Supplement on August 8 by saying: "It takes a particularly articulate writer to depict inarticulacy successfully, and Julia Darling's intelligent, sharp prose does just that. She captures the bleak realities of her protagonists' lives without ever losing sight of hopeful possibilities, and those living aspirations make the Taxi Driver's Daughter an uplifting book, in spite of the hard lives it describes."
(Access to the archived review on the TLS website is a chargeable service.)
The Independent ran a major interview by Christina Patterson in their Saturday magazine on 2 August, who called The Taxi Driver's Daughter "... a funny and touching portrayal of a working-class family which 'just muddles along'."
Julia was interviewed for the BBC Tyne website by Rahul Shrivastava and talked about the book, as well as her inspiration, her favourite music, and some advice for aspiring writers.
On Sunday 10th June 2007, the BBC Open Book programme featured The Taxi Driver's Daughter in an item about North East teenagers, in which writers Richard Milward and Ellen Phethean, and Claire Malcolm from New Writing North discussed the fictional depiction of teenagers on Tyneside as hard living and hard drinking. You can still hear the programme over the web via the BBC's Listen Again service, just follow the above link.
 |
Created by Julia Darling and Cornwell Internet. |
Last updated on 9th January 2009 by Roger Cornwell.
|