Velocity

The picaresque adventures of an eager young woman tap-dancing through the streets of New York and New Orleans to the rhythms of her boozy, freewheeling jazz-drummer father – it’s not surprising that Mandy Sayer’s first memoir, Dreamtime Alice, was widely embraced by reviewers and readers on its publication in 1998. Busking in the United States was Sayer’s attempt to graduate from being a listener to her father’s stories of on-the-road bonhomie into one of their players. Like her father, she uses the resulting tales to beguile and seduce, polishing them so that they reflect both the tradition of Broadway star stories and countless coming-of-age romances.