Maggie Gee (Maggie Mary Gee) Biography

British novelist, born in Poole, Dorset, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her first novel, Dying in Other Words (1981), a blackly comic meditation on death focusing around a group of Oxford students, was followed by The Burning Book (1983), an apocalyptic vision of nuclear holocaust, which received widespread critical acclaim. In 1983 she was selected as one of the Book Marketing Council's Best Young British Novelists. Light Years (1985), which concerns a love affair between a rich London socialite and an impoverished writer, is given a certain resonance by its use of cosmic imagery, which links the lives of its protagonists to the movements of the planetary system. Grace (1988), a novel based on a real murder in Britain during the 1980s, of anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell, fuses political thriller, polemic, and lyrical description of childhood. The sombreness of this work was matched by Where Are the Snows? (1991), a love story which followed its two wilful and solipsistic protagonists, Alexandra and Christopher, across several continents and over several decades as they abandon the responsibilities of their life in London (including the care of Christopher's teenage children). Set against the background of ecological disaster and increasing international tension, the book offers a kind of parable about the selfishness of individual desires. Lost Children (1994) was a return to form with its account of the plight of homeless children in London, focused in its central drama about a mother in search of a lost daughter.