Appleby House: A Memoir

Appleby House is Sylvia Smith’s delightful, refreshingly candid account of a year spent in a shabby bed-sit in 1980s London’s East End.

Smith’s engrossing, understated narrative invests the story of shared living: shifting allegiances, cleaning negotiations, debates about whose turn it is to change the toilet paper (it’s color-coded) and who’s been stealing whose hot water (50p buys 2 baths) with compulsive suspense of the highest order. As tensions build around Laura’s adamant refusal to t...