Light Years

by Maggie Gee

Lottie Lucas is the luckiest person she knows. She has looks, money, three houses and a teenage son she adores ...So why is her husband Harold walking out on her a few days before Christmas? Light Years is also about zoos and the zodiac; the seasons and the stars; and how humans see the natural world. It is a novel about the possibilities of happiness, a surprising and beautiful contemporary love story.

Genres: British Literature

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Maggie 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.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Gee’s The Burning Book was an astonishing blast of originality, a ruddy marvellous hidden wonder in the Faber & Ditto back catalogue. Her third one is seriously meh middlebrow fiction that barely rises to prose peaks of the previous. Read up to p.122.

[Victoria Anette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really good.And i want to exchange it with another book in the library.I wanna ask the librarian if i could get this book because i really liked it.It was like tracing each other in a year as the stars go on as the way it used to..yes look up off from the page you are reading and stare at the dark sky.Reach deeper as far as your eyes and mind can perceive.It was a good concept.I've been looking for a book like this.I am only 15 but i really like this book.I love the way things have their scientific probability like a WEEK is .004 of one person's life.I hope many will like this book too.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely more of a 4.5 stars - I really enjoyed it! I liked how the author zoomed out really far in the narrative and described what the planets were doing, and what people were doing all around the world, as well as detailing the everyday lives of the two main characters, Lottie and Harold. I thought it was a really unique book, and appreciated how the miscommunication between the characters felt genuine (as opposed to some more forced, frustrating miscommunication plot lines in more recent books) because they relied on calling each other from phone boxes and sending postcards.

[Coreen Balley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd read My Cleaner, with the entitled, middle class ant-heroine, funny, witty, clever. Read this in my early twenties, had fond memories. Expectations too high, it didn't deliver for me. Lottie got on my nerves, couldn't engage with her.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just Ok, certainly nothing earth shattering. I always felt for Davey and his rather dysfunctional family life. And the Tamarind. Nothing could have made me forgive Lottie for that horror. An absolute deal breaker for me.

[Helen Meads · Rating 2 out of 5]

40 years old and rather dated now. It’s all about overprivileged self-absorbed people, which is tedious. It earned the second star by having some will they/won’t they tension towards the end. I think it was meant to be funny, but not much of it was

Her other (later) books are much better.

[Betül · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read.

[Jo Birkett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite lightweight though fairly charming, I enjoyed reading & was glued to it by the end but not 5*, maybe it was her books generally that I rated 5* as I know I read lots of them at one time.

[Albertine67 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think 3 stars may actually be overegging it. I finished it, but I'm not really sure why I bothered. It didn't stay with me.

[Elisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty good 👍🏻

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good value.