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 distract 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.

My Driver is an entertaining, droll novel, executed with a lovely, light touch. . . . Gee's control of tone is supremely artful.--Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph

A tour de force--brilliantly structured, surprising, humane, and suspenseful.--Elaine Showalter

Worldly, witty, enjoyable, impressive.--Doris Lessing

Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies from London to Uganda for a Pan-African writers' conference. She also intends to pay her former cleaner, Mary Tendo, a surprise visit. But Mary--now the executive housekeeper of the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala--has her own agenda, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa's beloved ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, to her home village to help build a well.

The conference over, Vanessa sets off alone on a safari to the distant Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. Farce teeters on the edge of something much darker when Vanessa quarrels with her driver and a bloody war closes in on Bwindi from Congo. Can anyone save her?

Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's original Best Young British Novelists. She has published many novels to great acclaim, including The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC prizes, and My Cleaner and The Flood, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. She was the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and she lives in London.

My Cleaner is a moving, funny, engrossing book.--The Observer

Elegant, humorous and surprising, this is a classy performance.--The Times

Beautifully observed, intelligent and moving.--The Scotsman

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 toward a startling climax on a snowbound motorway.

Outstanding . . . tender, sexy and alarming.--Jim Crace

When Alfred White, patriarch of the White family, collapses at work, his wife, May, and their three disparate children find themselves confronting issues they would rather ignore. Maggie Gee skillfully weaves a narrative that reminds us that racism not only devastates the lives of its victims, but also those of its perpetrators.

Maggie Gee is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London. The White Family was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Award. The Flood was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Set in the near future, The Ice People imagines an ice age enveloping the Northern Hemisphere. It is Africa's relative warmth that offers a last hope to northerly survivors. As relationships between men and women break down, the novel charts one man's struggle to save his alienated son and bring him to the south and to salvation.

Maggie Gee is the author of The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Flood, longlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.

A wise and beautiful book about what it feels like to be alive--I really loved it.--Zadie Smith

Maggie Gee's account of her life as a writer cuts to the bone as she relives triumphs, rejections, despair and renewal. It's a wonderful book, for its boldness and vigour, and for its piercing honesty.--Claire Tomalin

How do you become a writer, and why?

Maggie Gee's journey starts in a small family in post-war Britain, a long way from the literary world. 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.

Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's original Best Young British Novelists. She has published many novels to great acclaim, including The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC prizes; My Cleaner; The Flood, longlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Ice People. She was the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2004-2008 and is now one of its vice presidents.

I have been dragged through time, summoned like a book requisitioned from a distant library, says Virginia Woolf, resurrected by modern-day author, Angela Lamb, working on Woolf manuscripts in the New York Public Library's Berg collection.
Angela dumps her irrepressible daughter at boarding-school to pursue her writing, so, when a bedraggled Virginia materialises among the bookshelves and is promptly evicted, Angela rushes to her rescue, chaperoning her wayward heroine.
Virginia drinks in the Algonquin, finds friends' paintings in the Met, and scams bookstores by selling pristine first editions of her novels, inscribed. Visits to independent booksellers make up for her disappointment in finding iconic bookstores closed.
Virginia flies with Angela to a conference in Istanbul, makes friends, finds new lovers, and steals the show at international meeting on - Virginia Woolf.
The novel asks what Virginia would make of contemporary literature, the book trade, love, sex and digital addictions? Are we free-er than in Woolf's day? By showing Woolf's joy in seizing life, Gee challenges the clich that great female artists are self-destructive, and engagingly shows Woolf's ideas on equality, feminism and bisexuality are as vibrant and important as ever.
A witty, profound novel about the miraculous possibilities of second chances.

Who attacked Dad? When a corrupt, brutal dentist, Albert Ludd, is found battered and bloody after failing to attend a memorial party for his youngest son, suspicion falls on the dentist's other children. Especially on Dad's middle daughter, 37-year-old buxom bruiser Monica Ludd, who was heard 'uttering threats' against her absent father. How come her car is found outside Dad's house? Why did she buy a large axe? And yet, Monica's a deputy head teacher... Blood is a Gothic black comedy seen through the eyes of six-foot Monica, who cannot help speaking her secret thoughts aloud and who has been banned by the principal of her school, from using social media. 'Parents are sensitive to abuse. Neil, I would never abuse our parents. Governors queried 'moron' and 'twat'. ' Set in an angry, anarchic, Brexit-ing Britain where terrorism has become routine, Blood also 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? Kirkus Reviews (05/01/2019): What should Monica Ludd, the fearless sister to five other Ludd siblings, do when she finds their horrible father beaten to a pulp? And what does the dysfunctional Ludd family's predicament tell us about Brexit Britain? The Ludds. Artistes of awfulness is how noted British novelist Gee (Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, 2014, etc.) introduces the bizarre family around which she builds her tragicomedy of revenge. Monica, 38, 6-foot-1, an amazon, strong, deep-chested, solid haunches, narrates the book, haunted by the fearsome childhood she endured. Her twin brothers, Boris and Angus, two jut-jawed Herculeses, their wand-thin model sister, Fairy, and another sister, glamazon Anthea, lived in dread of their cruel father, Albert, whose pitilessness forced the last child, Fred, into the army; he was killed in Afghanistan. But for all her power, Monica is not quite as tough as she seems. Discovering Albert's bloody, smashed-up body after a party to celebrate Fred's life, she flees, beginning a chain of farcical events that exposes both her resourcefulness and her vulnerability. The Ludds live in Thanet, a spit of land in southern England, the end and beginning of Britain, and Gee's nonstop procession of grotesques, slapstick, and sideswipes at Brexit and domestic terrorism attempts to point up connections between violence in personal relationships and other, larger scenarios. Lurid and breathless, driven by galumphing characters and some belly laughs, this furious tale of brutal times and remedies doesn't quite make that link, but the wild ride, underpinned by its author's sharp perceptions, entertains quite a bit. A horror movie-esque last act sees the family coming together to defeat oppression and Monica transformed at last from lone warrior to larger-than-life local hero. Even if the novel can seem unsettled, she's irresistible. A vibrant parable of abuse and survival, stronger on the family front than the national one. COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Commanding Wall Street Journal (07/16/2019) Publishers Weekly (05/20/2019): The family of teacher Monica Ludd, the 37-year-old narrator of this amusing, psychologically attuned crime novel from British author Gee (The White Family), is headed by her father, Albert, a dentist in Thanet, Kent, who sexually abuses his patients and cheats the government. Albert has raised six children, torturing them verbally and physically. Monica is preparing to throw a party honoring her younger brother, Fred, who was killed in Afghanistan. She plans a speech blaming Albert for Fred's death, because Albert bullied him into becoming a soldier. Her plans, however, go awry: Albert fails to come to the party, and Monica threatens in front of witnesses to kill him. The next morning, Monica goes to his house, armed with an ax, only to find her father already dead, slaughtered in his bed. Gee poses the question: is Monica culpable because she wanted to commit the crime but failed to execute it, or did she actually do it? The reader goes back and forth, not knowing what to believe. One doesn't have to be a mystery fan to appreciate this beautifully crafted and provocative tale. (July) Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission. Shelf Awareness (07/09/2019): Maggie Gee's Blood could be called an unorthodox thriller, a black comedy or representative of any number of other genres. For many American readers, it will be an introduction to the acclaimed author of 15 books published in the U.K. The genre may be difficult to place, but it's easy to see Gee's strengths, particularly in her characters. The novel is told primarily from the perspective of Monica Ludd, a gigantic, buxom woman from a family haunted by the abuse and cruelty meted out by their physically imposing father on his wife and children. When the father is attacked, Monica becomes the chief suspect. Blood's plot is not particularly twisty--despite the novel's short length, there are passages where Monica meditates on her twisted childhood and a country thrown into turmoil by Brexit and terrorist attacks. What carries the book is Monica's perspective: equal parts rude, funny, fearful, literate and randy. Monica is an unusual but effective vehicle for a conversation about the legacy of abuse and violence. The contradictory aspects of her character echo the difficulty of the topic. At one point, Monica reminds the reader that her father always adored her mother in the midst of relating the ways he tormented her: Yes, I know, it's complicated; life's complicated, get over it. Instead of twists and turns, Gee immerses the reader in dread. Her father's fate uncertain, Monica fears that he will return and continue his reign of terror. Blood asks whether a monster can be stopped without further monstrous violence. COPYRIGHT(2019) Shelf Awareness, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Gee has cr

A rare writer who is willing to address issues topical to contemporary Britain.--Daily Telegraph

The actors in these short stories quietly and unobtrusively assume their place in the world. An older woman rids herself of social shackles in the hypnotic title story as she moves toward the sea and freedom, a man packs in his day job to sell miniature suitcases, while a woman converts a freelance evangelist after their plane nearly crashes.

Maggie Gee is the author of the well-received novels The White Family and The Flood. She is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

The most exhilarating novel I've read all year.--Scotland on Sunday

A rich story of the heart told through a harlequin pattern of alternating voices, each of which is a work of real imaginative insight.--Marie Claire

Christopher and Alexandra's passion for each other raises eyebrows and invites envy. This beautiful, blinkered couple do the unthinkable and run away from home, abandoning their two teenage children. Their sudden departure is an act of glorious willfulness. Life in the countries they visit is nothing more than a backdrop to their love affair.

Fifteen years later, Alexandra is in remote Bolivia with a lover young enough to be her son and Christopher is in Venice, desolate and alone but for the pigeons and prostitutes. Tormented by past mistakes, neither can accept that they may never meet again.