Michèle Roberts

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels' promises of pleasure - and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house. As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other. Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Daughters of the House.

The Walworth Beauty

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therèse and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war. Intrigued by adults' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village's buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

Daughters of the House

A mesmerising exploration of guilt, faith, desire and judgement set in wartime France by Booker-shortlisted author Michele Roberts.

Ignorance

Twee afwisselend vertelde verhalen die zich afspelen in een wijk in Zuidoost Londen: het eerste over de belevenissen van een man die in 1851 prostituees interviewt en bevriend raakt met een geheimzinnige zwarte vrouw, en het tweede over een gepensioneerde docente die in 2011 in die wijk komt wonen.

A painter's death sets into motion a story of desire--past and present--and its enduring repercussions Catherine and Vinny are sisters and writers living in contemporary London. Catherine, a professor, publishes erotic novels under an assumed name, keeping her acclaimed novelist husband, Adam, in the dark. When not writing her poetry, Vinny wanders the streets of the city marking the houses of female authors with chalk quotations from their work. When Adam's father dies, both women are forced to reconsider the event that shaped their lives, the betrayal at the heart of their relationships. Haunted by their individual and common pasts, they must come to terms with each other, and with their present-day lives. Acclaimed author Michèle Roberts not only brings history to life--interwoven into this contemporary narrative is the story of another set of sisters, the Brontës--but illuminates the way it informs, or shadows, the present. Evocative, emotional, and intelligent, The Mistressclass is an exploration of the desires that move us--toward art and literature, and toward each other.

A Novel

The Mistressclass

Yesterday ended in disaster. Very late at night, I decided to write down everything that had happened; the only way I could think of coping.Following a series of devastating rejections, Michèle Roberts began keeping an account of her life in the hope it might help mend her shattered sense of self. In this intimate and wryly honest journal she reflects on cities and countryside, loss and love, food, friendships, sisterhood, pleasure and memories, her abiding relationship with France and with literature. Over the course of a year a new pattern of being develops, until, finally, she finds a better relationship between inner and outer worlds.

Negative Capability

Playing Sardines - a game in the dark, a game about desire, about wanting, all whipped up in a tale about the erotic allure of recipes: a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists working out how to deal with a husband who snores; a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle; a child greedy for love who faces up to her demon of jealousy - just some of the characters who shape this wonderful collection. Women yearning for what they haven't got - prepared to be wily, deceptive, cunning and perverse - all these strategies for survival in love and life are deployed here to mouth-watering effect.

Playing Sardines

From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a sensuous, evocative novel exploring the lives of women in Victorian London, for fans of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue and Kate Atkinson 2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels' promises of pleasure – and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house. As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other – a breath at Madeleine's neck, a voice in her head – the murmurs of ghosts echoing through time. Rendered in immediate, intoxicating prose, The Walworth Beauty is a haunting tale of desire and exploitation, isolation and loss, and the faltering search for human connection; this is Michèle Roberts at her masterful best.

Subversive, sensual tales, wise and witty fictions; this collection of short stories from one of Britain's most acclaimed novelists is by turns shockingly delicious and soberingly disquieting. When mother is away taboos are breached, the untouchables embraced and the forbidden tasted. In 'Laundry' a poor, plain girl takes devilish pleasure in outwitting the pious monks and nuns she washes for. In the haunting, powerful fable 'Anger' a young woman, branded by fire at birth by her mother is scarred- and blessed- for life. In the highly sensuous 'Taking it Easy' a mother with writers block finds an escape from the slavery of her twin enemies by turning them into food for thought. And in the beautiful, arresting 'God's House' a young girl faces the ultimate mother's absence.

During Mother's Absence

The Wild Girl

Denis is searching for his mother’s past, knowing she had secrets. In Nice, he finds her friends, Monique and Clemence. In the 1950s, they were Matisse’s assistants when he was old and ill, pinning up his coloured paper shapes, putting the great cut out works together. Monique inspired his great designs in the chapel at Vence; Clemence, in pursuit of love, was caught in an affair that led to violence and disaster. So they have their own intense and colourful past – but they hold the key to Denis’s past too. He’s about to face the greatest challenge of his life.

Cut Out

In the Red Kitchen

An outsider raised in an orphanage, GeneviFve lives a reclusive existence as maid to a widowed storyteller, until she escapes her village home to work for a captivating poet, who uses words to captivate the women around him, including GeneviFve, but she soon discovers that his stories can conceal dangerous secrets. By the author of Daughters of the House. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Michèle Roberts

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