(Wise Children is one of the all-time great comic novels – up there with the likes of the George and Weedon Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and Martin Amis’s Money). It is wise, bawdy, vulgar, eloquent and very, very funny. In Dora Chance, Angela Carter bequeathed to us one of the most distinctive, original narrative voices in modern English literature. In fact, with its irony-free leitmotif “What a joy it is to sing and dance!” I am hard-pressed to think of another book that is quite so life-affirming. Mostly, though, it is about life and living. But beneath all this high melodrama, Wise Children is primarily a book about family and forgiveness about love and loss failure and success. What mainly happens is that Dora recounts her family history – one which contains all the juicy Shakespearean tropes of ambition, greed and revenge fathers and daughters brothers and sisters twins, mistaken identity, incest and adultery. On this particular day the Chance sisters happen to be celebrating their 75th birthdays: It is a house that, like our narrator, Dora Chance, and her twin sister, Nora, has seen better days. The scene is 49 Bard Road, Brixton, present day (presumably circa 1991). A fictionalised showbiz memoir charting the slings and arrows inflicted on two very different branches of a once-great theatrical dynasty in London (the legitimate Hazards and the illegitimate Chances), there is a passage early on which, for me, encapsulates the enduring appeal of this novel. I return to it every year or so, always to find myself newly impressed by its brilliance. Do I detect romantic overtones? Or something more paternal? Perhaps a parting of the ways? (Certainly, at least, a parting of the ways for Bridget and this copy of Wise Children.) Whatever the true story behind Phil’s message to Bridget may be, I am not surprised that the novel inspired such an earnest and heartfelt inscription, because Wise Children – Carter’s last and greatest novel – is a book I have forced upon friends and family members over the years and never fail to recommend if asked.