Maggie Gee

"This ambitious, groundbreaking novel takes on the taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks for the roots of violence within the family and within British society. The Whites are an ordinary British family. 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 elder son has left for America and the youngest son is a virulent racist. The daughter is involved in an interracial relationship with a black social worker. When the father's sudden illlness forces the children to come together, their deep fears and prejudices come to the surface, raising issues about kinship, trust, and hatred"--Publisher's description.

Henry and Lorna are for the most part too involved in their ordinary lives to worry about global issues, so a final war seems to come upon them unprepared, just as their private lives are becoming happier.

After centuries of exclusivity, the Quatra Fleet Academy finally accepts students from the settler planets, forcing four teenagers from different backgrounds, with different ambitions, motives, and missions, to work together to outmaneuver a mysterious alien enemy.

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 herself materialises among the bookshelves and is promptly evicted, Angela, stunned, rushes after her on to the streets of Manhattan. Soon she is chaperoning her troublesome heroine as Virginia tries to understand the internet and scams bookshops with 'rare signed editions'. Then Virginia insists on flying with Angela to Istanbul, where she is surprised by love and steals the show at an international conference on - Virginia Woolf. Meanwhile, Gerda, ignored by her mother for days, has escaped from school and set off in hot pursuit.

"When the rain comes pouring down Mrs Farmer has no choice but to let the farm animals inside with some very funny results. She ends up with dogs in the kitchen, pigs in the laundry, cows in the dining room, sheep in the sitting room & hens that lay eggs in all sorts of surprising places. When the water recedes she sends them all back outside ... but not for long. A delightful story about finding companionship in unlikely places."--Provided by publisher.

"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.

Love, death and good behaviour looked very different to a girl growing up in a small family in 1950s England. Maggie Gee tells the true story of becoming an adult during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and living through dramatic changes in attitudes towards race, class and gender in the second half of the twentieth century. Writing intimately and frankly about her relationships, Maggie asks pertinent questions about love, sex, loss, parental duties and death. She tells how her understanding was transformed by seeing herself in the wider framework of animal life on earth. This remarkable memoir celebrates the joy and beauty of a short life on a hospitable planet.