Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Flood
    Unavailable
    The Flood
    Unavailable
    The Flood
    Ebook316 pages5 hours

    The Flood

    By Maggie Gee

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    President Bliss is handling a tricky situation with customary brio, but after months of ceaseless rain the city is sinking under the floods. The rich are safe on high ground, but the poor are getting damper in their packed tower blocks, and the fanatical 'Last Days' sect is recruiting thousands. When at last the sun breaks through the clouds Lottie heads off to the opera, husband Harold listens to jazz and their ditsy teenage daughter Lola fights capitalism by bunking off school. Shirley takes her twin boys to the zoo. The government - eager to detract attention from a foreign war it has waged - announces a spectacular City Gala. But not even TV astrologer Davey Lucas can predict the extraordinary climax that ensues. 'Gripping, original and highly entertaining - Maggie Gee at her superb best.' J G Ballard 'Dazzling ... alternately lyrical and austere ... unbearably touching.' The Observer 'Eloquent, angry and beautiful ... her best book yet.' Hilary Mantel 'The Flood is Gee's most apocalyptic vision to date ... an incredible feat of sustained imaginative continuity.' The Guardian 'A Must-Read Book for 2004.' Daily Mail ' ... an addition to an eccentric but valuable tradition of English fiction ... in which the visionary and the mundane mingle, producing effects by turn comical and grand.' Sunday Times 'Gee's ability to ask big "what if?" questions while never losing sight of the humdrum details of life ... gives her un-brave new world credibility.' The Independent '...exhuberant ... I thoroughly enjoyed it.' Sunday Telegraph 'The Flood, for all its passion and intricacy, is also a very funny book ... rewarding ... carefully written, using language echoing the water that ebbs and flows, and eventually floods the pages.' TLS ' ...a rare writer who is willing to address issues topical to contemporary Britain' Daily Telegraph 'A playful apocalypse.' The Bookseller ' ... a surprising melange of fantasy, realism, and very dry humour' Big Issue ' ... startling, insidious imagery' Metro 'Gee's admirably dyspeptic and frequently funny novel is a wake-up call to us all' Mail on Sunday 'Acutely drawn characters, and subtle observations about relationships and nature.' Time Out 'A satirist this lyrical, warm-hearted and imaginative is, like a unicorn, a rare and precious beast.' Weekend Australian
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaqi Books
    Release dateApr 16, 2012
    ISBN9780863568138
    Unavailable
    The Flood
    Author

    Maggie Gee

    Maggie Gee is the author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including The White Family (shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC prizes), and a memoir, My Animal Life. She is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages. Maggie Gee was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to literature.

    Read more from Maggie Gee

    Related to The Flood

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 243

      Dec 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 243
      24 min read

    • Article

      For Snow Queens Who Have Considered Suicide Because Paul Newman in the First Twenty Minutes of Paris Blues Is Too Much

      Jun 14, 2022

      But I start with the great Sidney Poitier because his stardom was an established part of the Freedom movement in 1964, and he was to be the chaperone of my inner awakening that dramatic year. Indianapolis, my hometown, had some brave marches and two

      10 min read

    • Article

      ‘My “Sad Girl” Fans Concern Me’: Ottessa Moshfegh In Conversation With Carmen Maria Machado

      Jul 2, 2022

      At 41, Ottessa Moshfegh has appeared on the Booker prize shortlist, for her debut novel Eileen, and the bestseller lists, with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, for which she is currently collaborating on a film adaptation. Her new novel, Lapvona, is s

      8 min read

    • Article

      Eliza Clark: ‘I’m More Primary School Teacher Than Enfant Terrible’

      Jun 24, 2023

      As a teenage goth in Newcastle upon Tyne, Eliza Clark would fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes in her bedroom while tuning into lurid true-crime podcasts with an avidity she now calls “prurient”. The 29-year-old, recently named on Granta magazine’s pre

      5 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen

      Mar 25, 2019

      Porter's second book is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices. The post The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen appeared first on The

      7 min read

    • Article

      Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels

      Apr 22, 2022

      I think of this as a new literary form, a type of novelistic prose poem, a hybrid, a chimera, whose main currency is delight, wonder, and mystery. The post Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      How High We Go In The Dark

      Dec 29, 2021

      ▸ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Sequoia Nagamatsu ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury There are surprisingly few SF stories about death. Sure, many books and films kill off characters. But only a handful – like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or Te

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Abu-Jaber, Shepherd, Ferrante, and More

      Mar 15, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Diana Abu-Jaber, Peng Shepherd, Elena Ferrante, and more—that are publishing this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Abu-Jaber, Shepherd, Ferrante, and More appeared first on The

      4 min read

    • Article

      Oceans

      Mar 15, 2019

      I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up. It was like that all my life. Then we moved to California, and after eight years of earthquakes I began to doubt my ability to put things i

      12 min read

    • Article

      Graphic Adaptation Of 'Heart Of Darkness' Takes On Canonical Racism, Artfully

      Nov 10, 2019

      Artist Peter Kuper has adapted Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness in a way that undercuts Conrad's depiction of Africa as a place of existential horror, and centers the African characters.

      3 min read

    Reviews for The Flood

    3.5/5

    15 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I liked the intelligence and the understated wit with which this was written, but am at a loss to understand why it wasn't just set in the real world. I recognised characters from Maggie Gee's previous novel "The White Family", and as far as I can remember that was set in the "real" world, so was baffled by that. I was expecting some kid of apocalypse novel based on the synopsis, but that element of it didn't really deliver. Best to appreciate this as a series of loosely connected vignettes with some well drawn characters. My favourite bit was the satirical depiction of the teenagers - as a parent of teenagers perhaps that's not surprising.
    • 4/5
      The time: more-or-less now. The place: a city which is more-or-less London - there is a President, not a Prime Minister, but he is prosecuting a war against a Muslim country in alliance with the President of more-or-less America (rather pointlessly disguised as 'Hesperica'). It's been raining for weeks and weeks, and almost without the residents realising it, floodwaters are creeping over more and more of the city. There is a huge cast of characters, from wealthy Lottie luxuriating in her comfortable life, to elderly May looking after her grandchildren and missing her dead husband, from ex-convict and apocalyptic cult member Dirk to self-centered novelist Angela and her neglected daughter Gerda. They are all affected, in different ways, by the flood, by rumours of strange planetary line-ups, and by the city's preparation for a grand Gala, more-or-less a great celebration of capitalism. But we soon realise that they are also deeply interconnected in a multitude of ways, and to me the rising waters seemed to symbolize social atomisation, which has crept up on us without our really noticing, as well as everything that goes with atomisation, such as lack of connection and community, prejudice, and inequality.I don't normally much like 'state of Britain'-type novels, and indeed after fifty pages I was ready to put this book aside. But for some reason I decided to give it another go, and I started to enjoy it very much. I think, in particular, it's because we see enough of the inner lives of our characters that they are not simply stereotypes or representatives of a particular social category, and they come together in unexpected ways. This makes it more subtle than other novels with a similar range, and yet it can still make its points effectively.
    • 3/5
      A rather embarrassing story of humankind. Written well enough, but not my cup of tea.