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Articles by Melanie Gay

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About Melanie Gay

A former literary agent with three published novels of her own, Melanie retains her life-long love of the written word and recently mastered the Kindle. She is currently writing a historical novel set in 17th Century Britain and Holland. More Posts

Olive Kitteridge/Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge and rightly so as it’s a fine novel. The structure is a collection of short stories set in the coastal town in Maine with the common theme of Olive Kitteridge, a former maths teacher in the local school appearing in all [...]

May 23, 2017 // 0 Comments

Keeping a diary

Mae West once said “Keep a diary and a diary will keep you”. I am always interested in why people keep a diary. In the case of politicians diaries tend to be self serving and remunerative. Barrack Obama is reportedly getting a record advance for his. The best written political diary in [...]

May 18, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Bugatti Queen/ Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour has written an outstanding biography of a woman of whom I have never heard, Helene Delangle aka Helle Nice arguably the finest female racing driver of all time. Born at the very start of the twentieth century, in a provincial French family, her father was a postman, she first went [...]

March 27, 2017 // 0 Comments

The thrill of crime

Crime/thriller-writing is a genre with legions of fans – I like to dabble myself from time to time quite separately from my reviewing duties – and it’s pleasing to note that some of its most popular exponents and indeed fictional characters are women. Here are some relevant links [...]

March 21, 2017 // 0 Comments

Golden Hill/Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford is a historian and broadcaster whose first effort at fiction wring is Golden Hill and it’s good. He has written a novel set in middle of the eighteenth century and in the style of Henry Fielding. It’s set in New York, not the heaving massive metropolis we know today but [...]

March 14, 2017 // 0 Comments

Trading Futures/ Jim Powell

When it comes to writing about angst and misery some feel that women do this best. I disagree. Novelists like Edward St Aubyn and now Jim Powell can “do” self- recrimination, pathos, self-absorption, fragmentation of the character with humour and sensitivity. Jim Powell has an [...]

January 31, 2017 // 0 Comments

Berlin Red/ Sam Eastland

Publishing is like most industries: if your competitors have a successful product, copy it. In 1989 Philip Kerr, a copywriter at Saatchi and Saatchi, wrote The March Violets set in Nazi Germany in the thirties and introduced to us the cop Bernie Gunther. Gunther was like Raymond Chandler’s [...]

January 26, 2017 // 0 Comments

Shantaram/Gregory David Roberts

I studied modern languages at school which provided an excellent education on French and German classic literature for which I am grateful. Our teacher had a theory that the life of the writer was irrelevant. The cleverest boy in our class challenged him one day on this. Since that day I have often [...]

January 10, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Spanish Game/Charles Cumming

My recent reviews of the Charles Cumming espionage novels reflect an admiration for this novelist. Indeed I would have put this admiration as high as nominating him as the successor to John le Carre. So I read an earlier one of his  called The Spanish Game and having just finished it I am less [...]

November 25, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Trinity Six/Charles Cumming

I am becoming a fan of espionage writer Charles Cumming having read and reviewed  favourably The Colder War.  Previous novels feature his hero Thomas Kell a wizard of detection through computer hacking and mobile surveillance and the French head of MI6 Amelie. The Trinity Six goes back in time to [...]

November 16, 2016 // 0 Comments

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