Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

About the Book

NOMINATED FOR THE 2015 FOLIO PRIZE

Bestselling author Angela Lamb is going through a mid-life crisis. She dumps her irrepressible daughter Gerda at boarding school and flies to New York to pursue her passion for Woolf, whose manuscripts are held in a private collection. When a bedraggled Virginia Woolf materialises among the bookshelves and is promptly evicted, Angela, stunned, rushes after her on to the streets of Manhattan.

Soon Angela is chaperoning her troublesome heroine as the latter tries to grasp the internet and scams bookshops with ‘rare signed editions’. Then Virginia insists on flying with her to Istanbul, finds a Turkish admirer and steals the show at an International Conference on – Virginia Woolf.

A witty and profound novel about the miraculous possibilities of a second chance at life.

About the Author

Maggie Gee is the author of seventeen critically acclaimed books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages. These include the novels The Red Children, My Cleaner and The White Family (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and a memoir, My Animal Life. Gee is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for her services to literature.

Reviews

‘Audacious, playful and dazzlingly written’
The Herald

‘A witty book ... It’s got everything in a novel that I really like’
Jacqueline Wilson’s Six Best Books, Express

‘Wickedly smart, funny and fearless, plus that rarest of all things, genuinely surprising’
Patrick Ness

‘Gee does a terrific (and puckishly poetic) job with Woolf’s wit and acuity, her hoots of laughter and sudden fadings of joy ... Wickedly funny’
Sunday Telegraph

‘This giddily playful novel from Maggie Gee is a cunning what if: what if Virginia Woolf were to suddenly reappear in a library in modern-day Manhattan? ... It's a gloriously funny, fleet-footed novel about the relationships between women and the ways literary heroes live on in our imaginations.’
Metro

‘A remarkable feat ... Gee’s strength as a writer is to allow the fantastical and plausible to coexist ... [She] has made Woolf abundantly human once more in this exhilarating novel, with its passages of lyrical beauty that celebrate our material existence’
Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Bulletin