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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

Michel Houllebecq and Jane Austen

I have just finished Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq. It’s a novella of less than 80 pages and contains his normal themes of sex obsession and mass tourism. The story – such as it is – is that Michel, refusing to go to a Muslim country, decides on Lanzarote the Canary Island for a [...]

August 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Tales of the Unexpected/Genesis and the Catastrophe

Readers will recall my enjoyment of this series re-run on Sky Arts. They last 30 minutes, normally feature a well-known actor (Rod Taylor featured in the one immediately prior to this) and directors like the playwright Ronald Harwood. I enjoy trying to guess the twist. This episode had me totally [...]

August 16, 2022 // 0 Comments

Ancestry: A Novel/Simon Mawer

Since publication of The Glass Room, a novel based less on people than a modernist villa in Czechoslovakia, Simon Mawer has had a loyal readership. In his latest Ancestry he recounts the stories of Abraham Block, who goes to sea from the Suffolk village of Kessingland, and Corporal George Mawer [...]

August 10, 2022 // 0 Comments

The Blue Afternoon

The literary and film device of the flashback and/or flash forward often works well provided there are linkage and revelation. In the last novel I reviewed here Bad Relations it worked particularly well. In William Boyd’s latest The Blue Afternoon it works less well. The story begins in Los [...]

June 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Bad relations/Cressida Connolly

This is an outstanding novel by a writer scaling the heights of British fiction. It begins in the Crimean War when William Gale is tending for his recently slain brother Algernon. He sends a lock of his hair home. Gale returns to his estates in Cornwall but – due to then undiagnosed post [...]

June 8, 2022 // 0 Comments

Recommending & reviewing books

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow Ruster who touched upon a theme which I will explore here and now. He was given a book by a friend who enthused over it. The Ruster, who readily admits to being no bibliophile, wondered whether I knew the book in question which I did not. The point [...]

May 4, 2022 // 0 Comments

Two novels set in Florence: Angels of Mud & Still Life

As Venice is for painters so Florence has attracted writers: E. M Forster’s Room With a View and Alex Preston’s In Love and War to name but two. By happenstance the last two novels I have read were both set in post war Florence. Curious too with half the Rust team in Nice. The first – [...]

April 22, 2022 // 0 Comments

The End of The Affair/Graham Greene

My late mother read this novel when pregnant with me. I still retain her copy but I have just re-read it via audio book. The narrator was that excellent actor Colin Firth. That narration is in the “I” form and that of Maurice Bendrix, an author himself, having an affaire with Sarah Miles who [...]

March 24, 2022 // 0 Comments

Kiss Myself Goodbye/Ferdinand Mount

This is the story of the aunt of Ferdinand Mount who was the former editor of the Times Literary Review and advisor of Mrs. Thatcher. He called her Aunt Munca but she gave herself many names in her life journey from childhood in a poor part of Sheffield to a suite in Claridges and a house in [...]

February 25, 2022 // 0 Comments

Prague Fatale (Philip Kerr) and Berlin Nightfall (Jack Grimwood)

It is the best testimony to the writing of Philip Kerr that after reading a few chapters of Prague Fatale I realised I have already read it. I was sufficiently engaged and engrossed to continue to its end. It’s set in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia when Reinhard Heydrich, the ruthless [...]

February 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

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