Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

"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 engrossing read.

Maggie GeeThe White FamilyThe FloodMy Cleaner, My Driver, The Ice PeopleMy Animal LifeVirginia Woolf in Manhattan

Maggie was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004–2008, and is now one of its Vice-Presidents. She 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

Set in the near future, 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 GeeThe White FamilyThe Flood

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. Their sudden departure is an act of glorious wilfulness. Life in the countries they visit serves as nothing more than a backdrop to the vagaries of their love affair. Initially their loyal neighbour receives the odd postcard, but that soon stops.

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.

A haunting story of obsessive love and a moving testimony to the bonds that tie us to our past, regardless of distance or time traveled.

Maggie GeeThe White FamilyThe FloodMy Cleaner, My Driver, The Ice PeopleMy Animal LifeVirginia Woolf in Manhattan

Maggie was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004–2008, and is now one of its Vice-Presidents. She lives in London.

The Whites are an ordinary British family: love, hatred, sex and death hold them together, and tear them apart. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Alfred White, a London park keeper, still rules his home with fierce conviction and inarticulate tenderness. May, his clever, passive wife, loves Alfred but conspires against him. Their three children are no longer close; the successful elder son, Darren, has escaped to the USA. When Alfred collapses on duty, his beautiful, childless daughter Shirley, who lives with Elroy, a black social worker, is brought face to face with Alfred's younger son Dirk, who hates and fears all black people. The scene is set for violence. In the end Alfred and May are forced to make a climatic decision: does justice matter more than kinship?