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Michèle Roberts

Books

The Yellow-Haired Boy and Other Stories
Short stories (publication date May 2001)

The Looking Glass (2000)

Genevieve is maid to Madame Patin in a country bar and cafe and becomes the breathless audience to her mistress's folk stories, beginning with the siren-calling mermaid. As Genevieve's own comeliness ripens to siren-like beauty, she takes flight, only to end up with another word-spinner - the poet.

Hardcover (May, 2000) Little, Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316854565

Reviews

Fair Exchange (1999)

This novel draws in the secrets, lives and affairs of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth. In the early 1800s, Louise, a French peasant, calls her priest, fearing she is about to die. She has a secret to confess which she must tell from the beginning and which involves a young English poet.

Paperback (February, 2000) Virago Press; ISBN: 1860497640

On Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration and Writing (1998)

"Food, sex and God" is what Roberts answers when strangers ask what she writes about. In this collection the topics are extended from her fiction and poetry to essays, reviews and articles, including a monologue on would-be writers and a piece on autobiographical writing and the imagination.

Paperback (July, 1998) Virago Press; ISBN: 1860494552

 

Impossible Saints (1997)

the story of Josephine, who is ironically decreed a saint around the time of the Inquisition for all the wrong reasons; a status achieved by her adept duplicity in the face of threatened torture as a heretic.

Hardcover (May, 1997) Little, Brown & Company; ISBN: 0316639575

 

Paperback (July, 1998) Virago Press; ISBN: 1860494560

All the Selves I Was: Selected Poems 1986-1994 (1995) (available from Waterstone's)

A collection of poems which examine Roberts's continuing preoccupations with love, death, food and sex, working through metaphor to create a way of looking at the world which links the body/self to others, to nature, and to life in the city.

ISBN:1853818291 Virago Press ( Little, Brown & Company (UK)

Flesh & Blood (1994)

Michèle Roberts explores responsibility and abandonment, desire and loathing, longing and belonging, and in particular, mother-daughter relationships.

Freddy thinks he has committed matricide, and his fantasies - or perhaps realities - become stories which twist back through time to varying landscapes. He searches for a home, only to find it in an unexpected place. When able and allowed to return to the present, he can choose which tale to tell.

Paperback (June, 1995) Virago Press; ISBN: 1860491308

During Mother's Absence (1993)

Paperback (July, 1994) Virago Press; ISBN: 185381797X

A collection of short stories.

 

Daughters of the House (1992)

Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid, old Normandy house in which Therese and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up after the war. Intrigued by parents' and servants' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find buried in the woods, the girls weave their own elaborate fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village secret and a deep shame that will come to haunt them in their adult lives.

Reviews

In the Red Kitchen (1990)

This is an interweaving of several stories spanning Ancient Egypt, Victorian and contemporary London. The central of these (based loosely on a true life) is of a young Victorian medium, Flora Milk, and the attention she receives from a scientist. Taken into the family home and fêted somewhat patronisingly by the sickly wife, Flora is subjected to a detailed but very secretive study of her 'powers'.

Paperback (May, 1997) Vintage; ISBN: 0749391154

The Book of Mrs Noah (1987)

When Mrs Noah enters her Ark, as a librarian she knows it contains all things. After summoning the five sister-Sybils, all writers dangerously approaching desperation, they are joined by a male interloper, the Gaffer, self-styled Creator who now has problems of his own. They are all storytellers, and harshly themed stories are what the book demands of them. In between time, while Mrs Noah alone explores the islands visited by the Ark, the Sibyls and the Gaffer do their own exploring in the one taboo area within the Ark itself

Paperback - (arch, 1991) Vintage; ISBN: 074939773X

The Wild Girl (1984)

In the parched soil of Provence, a fifth gospel has been discovered. It is Mary Magdalene's account of Christ's teaching and her relationship with him, and it unveils a new Christianity which embraces the female equally with the male.

Paperback (March, 1991) Vintage; ISBN: 0749391146

The Visitation (1983)

(available from Waterstone's)

Paperback (January 1983) The Women's Press; ISBN:070433903X

A Piece of the Night (1978)

This is the story of Julie. The dutiful daughter, the romantic heroine, the perfect wife and mother. The women who seeks nothing but acceptance. But Julie knows she is also the witch, the whore, the madwoman, the insatiable, the lesbian. As her two worlds threaten to collide and fall apart, Julie slips between the cracks of time. Amid the familiar icons of church and childhood, she remembers: peace has to be won...

Paperback (November 1978) The Women's Press; ISBN: 0704338300

©2000 Michèle Roberts

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