Hideous Kinky is the intimate odyssey of Julia and her daughters Lucy and Bea, who have left the grey routine of London for the colorful promises of Morocco. Since her former lover (and the girls father) has moved onto other lovers (and other children), Julia seeks some greater horizon for hereself, and to enrich her daughters with a fearless curiosity and embrace of adventure.
This thirst for experience takes them to Marrakech, a vibrant city of mosques, music and kaleidoscopic marketsm, where Lucy and Bea run wild from sensation to sensation. But the richness of their discoveries contrasts sharply with a meager existence stretched between erratic support checks from the girl's negligent father. Just as their new lives uncomfortably begin to resemble their old ones, they are each transformed by Bilal, a charismatic street performer who becomes a lover to Julia, a fabled father to Lucy, and Bea's looking-glass into civilization so alien from the one she knows.
With Bilal completing their vagabond family, they embark on a journey that will take them through the hidden worlds of Marrakech, the old-world traditions of a remote mountain village and into Algeria, where the wisdom of a renowned Sufi burns as bright for Julia as an elusive grail. Hideous Kinky is a sonnet to an exotic culture, a love story between people of different worlds, and a paean to a mother's quest to gift her children with the courage of dreams.
"Hideous was Bea's and my favourite word. 'Hideous and Kinky.' They were the only words we could remember Mum's old friend, Maretta, ever having said. 'Hideous Kinky, hideous kinky,' I chanted to myself. To us, the words meant anything beautiful, absurd, or frightening."
