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The Blue
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 towards 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 deftly encapsulates a world in which a moment of impatience with a spouse can cost a family their lives and a dying man's last thoughts are of gathering his wife's favourite flowers in a bouquet. Her characters are all too familiar in their struggle for fulfilment and their efforts to come to grips with bittersweet, but enduring love.
These exquisite stories of everyday life are set against an intricately woven backdrop encompassing larger issues of poverty, race relations, and social prejudices. They are stories about love that tell us something about life, and how people negotiate a path for themselves.
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, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2004; and The Flood, which was longlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize. She has also published My Cleaner, My Driver, The Ice People and My Animal Life, with Telegram. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is her latest novel.
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.
Maggie Gee deftly encapsulates a world in which a moment of impatience with a spouse can cost a family their lives and a dying man's last thoughts are of gathering his wife's favourite flowers in a bouquet. Her characters are all too familiar in their struggle for fulfilment and their efforts to come to grips with bittersweet, but enduring love.
These exquisite stories of everyday life are set against an intricately woven backdrop encompassing larger issues of poverty, race relations, and social prejudices. They are stories about love that tell us something about life, and how people negotiate a path for themselves.
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, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2004; and The Flood, which was longlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize. She has also published My Cleaner, My Driver, The Ice People and My Animal Life, with Telegram. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is her latest novel.
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.
212 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2006
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About the author
Maggie Gee
39 books52 followersMaggie Gee is an English novelist. She was born in Poole, Dorset, then moved to the Midlands and later to Sussex. She was educated at state schools and at Oxford University (MA, B Litt). She later worked in publishing and then had a research post at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed the department's first PhD. She has written eleven novels and a collection of short stories, and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004-2008. She is now one of the Vice-Presidents of the RSL and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has also served on the Society of Authors' management committee and the government's Public Lending Right committee. Her seventh novel, The White Family, was shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
She writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing is characterised by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironised sense of the beauty of the natural world. Her human beings are biological as well as social creatures, partly because of the influence of science and in particular evolutionary biology on her thinking. Where are The Snows, The Ice People and The Flood have all dealt with the near or distant future. She writes through male characters as often as she does through female characters.
The individual human concerns that her stories address include the difficulties of resolving the conflict between total unselfishness, which often leads to secret unhappiness and resentment against the beneficiaries, and selfishness, which can lead to the unhappiness of others, particularly of children. This is a typical quandary of late-20th and early-21st-century women, but it is also a concern for privileged, wealthy, long-lived western human beings as a whole, and widens into global concerns about wealth and poverty and climate change. Her books also explore how the human species relates to non-human animals and to the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family and My Cleaner, have had racism as a central theme, dealt with as a tragedy in The White Family but as a comedy in My Cleaner. She is currently writing a memoir called My Animal Life. In 2009 she published "My Driver", a second novel with many of the same characters as My Cleaner, but this time set in Uganda during a time of tension with neighbouring DRC Congo.
Maggie Gee lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, an author, and their daughter Rosa.
She writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing is characterised by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironised sense of the beauty of the natural world. Her human beings are biological as well as social creatures, partly because of the influence of science and in particular evolutionary biology on her thinking. Where are The Snows, The Ice People and The Flood have all dealt with the near or distant future. She writes through male characters as often as she does through female characters.
The individual human concerns that her stories address include the difficulties of resolving the conflict between total unselfishness, which often leads to secret unhappiness and resentment against the beneficiaries, and selfishness, which can lead to the unhappiness of others, particularly of children. This is a typical quandary of late-20th and early-21st-century women, but it is also a concern for privileged, wealthy, long-lived western human beings as a whole, and widens into global concerns about wealth and poverty and climate change. Her books also explore how the human species relates to non-human animals and to the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family and My Cleaner, have had racism as a central theme, dealt with as a tragedy in The White Family but as a comedy in My Cleaner. She is currently writing a memoir called My Animal Life. In 2009 she published "My Driver", a second novel with many of the same characters as My Cleaner, but this time set in Uganda during a time of tension with neighbouring DRC Congo.
Maggie Gee lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, an author, and their daughter Rosa.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 16, 2024
More known for her novels, this is Maggie Gee’s first collection of short stories published in 2007. What sets the collection squarely in the early 2000s is the reference to the second Gulf War and the heightened religious and racial sensitivities even in these small residential London towns far away from the conflict.
From the stark picture of a self-effacing and downtrodden woman walking apologetically towards the sea and possibly drowning herself in the first story, you get the sense of quiet desperation that oozes from the pores of the characters in the stories that follow as they plod on, survive (or not), trying to make sense of their reduced lives and compounded loss, railing and raging, or sinking soundlessly.
Widows and tramps, alienated spouses, distant mothers and neglectful children, they all exist under the same unrelenting blue sky, the terrible beauty of nature set in contrast with these private struggles, as if mocking the misery of these characters. Life (of unaffected others) goes on regardless.
While more often than not, there is no promise of recovery or redemption, I felt strangely lulled by the quiet cadence of these stories.
From the stark picture of a self-effacing and downtrodden woman walking apologetically towards the sea and possibly drowning herself in the first story, you get the sense of quiet desperation that oozes from the pores of the characters in the stories that follow as they plod on, survive (or not), trying to make sense of their reduced lives and compounded loss, railing and raging, or sinking soundlessly.
Widows and tramps, alienated spouses, distant mothers and neglectful children, they all exist under the same unrelenting blue sky, the terrible beauty of nature set in contrast with these private struggles, as if mocking the misery of these characters. Life (of unaffected others) goes on regardless.
While more often than not, there is no promise of recovery or redemption, I felt strangely lulled by the quiet cadence of these stories.
July 1, 2014
Bought this book on a whim because I love short stories and was pleasantly surprised. The narrative was engaging and the ideas were poetic yet realistic. I look forward to reason more or Maggie Gee's work.
February 27, 2023
Only a few good ones most were quite boring not what I thought it would be
April 11, 2013
Well written book, but the main characters were not likeable at all, especially the vain lady in the second story with her head full of shallow thoughts and stupidity. I understand the stories were slices of life and nobody is perfect, but I don't like to read stories of characters that are boring and stupid. After a while I stopped reading, I really didn't like this book.
It's a shame because the cover and plot on the back cover made me very curious...
It's a shame because the cover and plot on the back cover made me very curious...
August 22, 2011
Selection of short stories - some OK. Still recall her annoying voice from the OU & patronising tone - bit like this book.
November 16, 2015
Maggie Gee has a knack of saying more in one sentence than a lot of people manage in a whole volume of books.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews