Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies from London to Uganda for an African writers' conference. She also means to visit her former cleaner, Ugandan Mary Tendo, now the successful Executive Housekeeper of Kampala's up-market Sheraton Hotel. But Mary has her own agenda: her son Jamil is missing, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa's beloved ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, to her home village to build a new well. Vanessa sets off alone on safari to distant Bwindi Imp...

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? 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.

It's the 2030s in Ramsgate and four people who don't look quite human are found sitting, naked, in the early spring sunlight on the quay of the quiet south coast resort. The locals are puzzled – the newcomers are larger and heavier than they are and say they are fleeing the heat. Soon more arrive. Their tall red-haired leader, The Professor, talks to the universe. The locals talk among themselves.Red people appear everywhere, making friends, going into the caves, liked by some but ...

Alfred White, a London park keeper, rules his home with a mixture of rigidity and tenderness that has estranged his three children. For years, Alfred's daughter Shirley and her black partner Elroy have avoided her comically ignorant younger brother Dirk, who admires his father and hates people of colour. But family ties are strong: when Alfred collapses on duty one day, all the children rush to be with him. The scene is set for bloodshed, forcing Alfred to make a climactic choice between j...

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 chaperonin...

It's the middle of the twenty-first century, and the next Ice Age has suddenly sent global warming into reverse. Saul is one of the Ice People, the threatened peoples of the northern hemisphere, who, watching their world freeze over, try to move south towards the equator... 'Excellent ... intelligent, driven, imaginative, obsessive yet still gracious, one of our best ... Exciting stuff.' Fay Weldon 'Ambitious and subtle... She writes elegantly, unsentimentally, expertly... The Ice People w...

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 - 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 te...

'…the joy of reading Maggie Gee.' – The ObserverThe people in The Blue, Maggie Gee's first collection of short stories, try and often fail to understand the world, freeing themselves by small acts of courage, love or folly. A journalist decides to convert an evangelist in mid-air; a solicitor gives up his day job to help young artists; a Middle Eastern woman shocks her children as she walks through the heat towards the sea; a man, in a moment of m...

Paula is a victim of mysterious harassment. She lives near the railway line that carries nuclear waste through the heart of London and feels curiously, constantly unwell. Grace, her remarkable eighty-five-year-old aunt, deplores the evils of the modern world. When she, too, is plagued by silent phone calls, she escapes to Seabourne on the South Coast, where nothing ever happens except quiet deaths and holidays. Bruno is a sexually quirky private detective who attacks daisies with scissors,...

How do you become a writer, and why? Maggie Gee's journey starts a long way from the literary world in a small family in post-war Britain. 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...

• Revenge parable from top novelist, set in angry, anarchic times, where terrorism has become routine • Fans of Maggie Gee include: Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel, Patrick Ness, Jane Gardam, Elaine Showalter, Julian Barnes • ‘Supremely artful’ Lionel Shriver; ‘Gripping, original, highly entertaining - Gee is superb’ J G Ballard. • Satire on power, corruption, capitalism, war-mongering, bullying, racism, nationalism, terrorism, told with infectious, wicked glee, with upbeat ending - a literary ...

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 wilfulness. 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 th...