Maggie Gee

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. In this anthology, authors have worked together with scientists and historians to bring vividly to life the stories behind the 'eureka!' moments that changed the way we live, forever.

A new novel from critically acclaimed British author Maggie Gee. A topical and deeply moving meditation on belonging, set in the near future, against a backdrop of migration pressures, climate change and an increasing isolationist mood in the UK.

Twentieth anniversary edition of this timeless, groundbreaking novel about race and racism in modern Britain, with new introduction by Booker-prize-winning author and cultural commentator Bernadine Evaristo; and a note from the author reflecting on changes in the conversation regarding race and literature over the past two decades.

Who attacked Dad? When corrupt, brutal dentist Albert Ludd is found battered and bloody after failing to attend a memorial party for his youngest son, a solider, suspicion falls on his other children, especially 37-year-old buxom bruiser Monica, who was heard “uttering threats” against her absent father. How come her car is found outside his house? Why did she buy a large axe? Yet, Monica’s a deputy head. Blood is a Gothic black comedy seen through the eyes of six-foot Monica, who speaks her secret thoughts aloud and who has been banned by the principal of her school, from using social media: “Parents are sensitive to abuse. Governors query `moron’ and `twat’.” Blood asks serious questions about modern life: what can we do with the brutal men who bully women and the weak? Can we wait for a world of order and justice? If we hit back, can the circle of violence ever be broken?

What if Virginia Woolf came back to life in the twenty-first century?Bestselling author Angela Lamb is going through a mid-life crisis. She dumps her irrepressible daughter Gerda at boarding school and flies to New York to pursue her passion for Woolf, whose manuscripts are held in a private collection. When a bedraggled Virginia Woolf materialises among the bookshelves and is promptly evicted, Angela, stunned, rushes after her on to the streets of Manhattan. Soon Angela is chaperoning her troublesome heroine as the latter tries to grasp the internet and scams bookshops with 'rare signed editions'. Then Virginia insists on flying with her to Istanbul, finds a Turkish admirer and steals the show at an International Conference on - Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is a witty and profound novel about the miraculous possibilities of a second chance at life.

How do you become a writer, and why? Maggie Gee's journey starts a long way from the literary world in a small family in post-war Britain,. At seventeen, Maggie goes, a lamb to the slaughter, to university. From the 1960s onwards she lives the defining events of her generation: the coming of the Pill and sexual freedom, tremors in the British layer-cake of class and race. In the 1980s, Maggie finally gets published, falls in love, marries and has a daughter - but for the next three decades and beyond, she survives, and sometimes thrives, by writing. This frank, bold memoir dares to explore the big questions: success and failure, sex, death and parenthood - our animal life.

Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies out to Uganda for an African writers' conference. She also means to visit her former cleaner, Ugandan Mary Tendo, now the successful Executive Housekeeper of Kampala's Sheraton Hotel. But Mary has her own agenda: her son Jamil is missing, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa's beloved ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, to her village to help build a new well. Vanessa sets off alone on safari to distant Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. But then Vanessa quarrels with her driver and a bloody war closes in on Bwindi from Congo. Can anyone save her? Will Mary Tendo find her son?

It's the middle of the 21st century, and the next Ice Age has suddenly sent global warming into reverse. Saul is one of the Ice People, the threatened peoples of the northern hemisphere, who, watching their world freeze over, try to move south towards the equator. 'Set in the near future, it imagines not a globally warmed world, but an earth slowly returning to aridity and cold. A universal freeze has also descended upon relationships between men and women, who live in morbid segregation, with feathered robots as sexual partners. In a neat reversal of First World-Third World assumptions, Africa's relative warmth offers a last hope to northerly survivors as the novel charts one man's struggle to rescue his alienated son and bring him to where the sun shines' - Rose Tremain.

My cleaner. She does my dirty work. She knows more about me than anyone else in the world. But does she, in fact, like me? Does her presence fill me with shame? Ugandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin - now twenty-two, handsome and gifted - is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a startling climax on a snowbound motorway. Maggie Gee confronts racism and class conflict with humour and tenderness in this moving, funny, engrossing read.

Christopher and Alexandra's passion for one another raises eyebrows and invites envy. This beautiful, blinkered couple do the unthinkable and run away from home, abandoning their two teenage children. This is a story of obsessive love and a testimony to the bonds that tie us to our past, regardless of distance or time travelled.

President Bliss is handling a tricky situation with customary brio, but after months of ceaseless rain the city is sinking under the floods. The rich are safe on high ground, but the poor are getting damper in their packed tower blocks, and the fanatical 'Last Days' sect is recruiting thousands ... When at last the sun breaks through the clouds Lottie heads off to the opera, husband Harold listens to jazz and their ditsy teenage daughter Lola fights capitalism by bunking off school. Shirley takes her twin boys to the zoo. The Government - eager to detract attention from a foreign war it has waged - announces a spectacular City Gala. But not even TV astrologer Davey Lucas can predict the extraordinary climax that ensues.