Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English
Categories

BLOOD

Maggie Gee

When a corrupt, brutal dentist, Albert Ludd, is found battered and bloody after failing to attend a memorial party for his youngest son, suspicion falls on his other children. Especially on Dad's middle daughter, 37-year-old buxom bruiser Monica Ludd, who was heard "uttering threats" against her absent father. Why was her car found outside Dad's house? Why did she buy a large axe? And yet, Monica's a deputy head teacher. . .

Blood is a Gothic black comedy seen through the eyes of six-foot Monica, who cannot help speaking her secret thoughts aloud, who is a big woman with big appetites, and who shares the unhealed scars of the family's dark history with her siblings. She's the "brave" one, the one who's unafraid - but how far will she go? And will Ginger, the policeman on the case, sleep with her?

Maggie Gee has written 15 books to great acclaim in the UK, including Flood and My Cleaner, and her work has been translated into fourteen languages. One of Granta's original "Best Young British Novelists" (1983, with William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes), she has been shortlisted for major prizes including the Orange (now Baileys), the IMPAC and been a Booker Prize judge. The first female Chair of the UK Royal Society of Literature, she is now one of its Vice-Presidents. Gee works as a professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, writes novels and journalism, and is a Director of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. The Queen awarded her an OBE for Services to Literature in 2012.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-02-01 by Fentum Press

Comments

Blood by Maggie Gee is a very funny and daring novel about Monica, an unforgettable, galumphing, middle-aged school teacher and misfit, whose deluded self-belief and critical observations about the rest of humankind hide a deep-seated trauma. Gee weaves the seriousness of Brexit politics and bigotry in a seaside Kentish town with the psychological legacy of violent parenting in a thrillerish blend of whodunnit-cum-family drama. --- Bernardine Evaristo Bernardine Evaristo's “Best book of the Year 2019” recommendation in The Financial Times Read more...

An astonishing book. Funny and fierce, written with style and dash, without fear. (Hilary Mantel)

[...] Though her political conclusions may be naive, equating Albert with US and UK forces in the Middle East and his terrorised children with Isis, in its own knockabout, miniaturised way, Blood is an intriguing meditation on cycles of violence, and vengeance versus forgiveness. With jokes. -- The Guardian Read more...

Gee is exploring the perennial questions of how to break the cycle of violence passed down the generations, and the ways in which men (and sometimes women) exercise control through fear [...]the story takes place in a Britain ground down by interminable Brexit on one hand, and a rise in terrorist attacks on the other, in which violence, domestic and political, has become normalised. Read more...