A01=Maggie Gee
Author_Maggie Gee
belonging
caregiving
Category=FBA
change
class
climax
compassion
conflict
connection
culture
dependency
depression
displacement
domesticity
emotion
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
family
friendship
guilt
healing
help
heritage
house
humour
identity
inequality
introspection
London
loss
loyalty
memory
migration
motherhood
past
power
privilege
racism
relationship
resilience
return
reunion
shift
snow
society
struggle
surprise
tenderness
tension
transformation
trauma
Uganda
Product details
- ISBN 9781846590085
- Weight: 326g
- Dimensions: 130 x 200mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2006
- Publisher: Saqi Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 moving, funny, engrossing read.
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 is the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.
