Articles by Melanie Gay

I very much enjoyed Sleep in Peace Tonight by James MacManus , built around Harry Hopkins, envoy of President Roosevelt’s trip to London in 1941. So when the helpful people at Amazon as part of their “If you liked X ,  you would like Y ‘ service, recommended his Midnight in [...]

Novels set in both Ireland and the USA like Brooklyn (now a film) are all the rage. Colm Toibin the author of Brooklyn leads the genre but Colum McCann runs him close. I very much enjoyed his Let the Great World Spin as did many as it became an international bestseller. Transatlantic had been lying [...]

Edward St Aubyn made his name with a series of novels, five in all,  featuring Patrick Melrose who was raped by his father. These are rather searing though extremely well written and in parts amusing. One literary friend of mine was reduced to tears by them. They generally had clever ambiguous [...]

An aunt of mine who went to Forest Mere Health Hydro some 50 years ago met George Weidenfked there. She even was invited to his famous parties. It was an early introduction to me of one of the most magnetic and charismatic of post war publishers who died this week. On the Rust we like to dispel [...]

Nevil Shute was a writer you regularly saw on bookshelves in the sixties with such popular bestsellers as On the Beach and  A Town called Alice. I had heard of him , for the least two but not the novel recommended by Harriet Gilbert on A Good Read, namely Pied Piper. Nevil Shute – like James [...]

The author Norman Lewis may not mean much to the contemporary reader but as a notoriously shy man the travel writer would have preferred this. He once described himself as the only man to come to and leave a party without anyone noticing. Like many private people,there was much to him. A gifted [...]

The recommendation of books is the artery of the book world. The most obvious source is the critic or reviewer. However there are problems here. The reviewer can be a disaffected writer, possibly a biographer selling 5000 books for one year’s hard toil and jealous of a popular writer that can [...]