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My Cleaner
My Cleaner
My Cleaner
Ebook395 pages5 hours

My Cleaner

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Ugandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin - now twenty-two - is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a climax on a snowbound motorway. 'Beautifully observed, intelligent and moving … a carefully wrapped surprise that gets better and better with the unravelling.' The Scotsman 'A moving, funny, engrossing book.' The Observer 'Gee satirises the liberal conscience of the chattering classes with uncomfortable perception in this hugely enjoyable novel … her portrayal of Britain's new underclass of immigrant workers is presented with her trademark stinging clarity.' Metro 'Maggie Gee is a superb and pitiless analyser of middleclass angst. Elegant, humorous and surprising, this is a classy performance.' The Times 'It's amazing how many details, characters, stories within stories, Maggie Gee's unquenchable exuberance crams into this comparatively short book.' The Spectator An intelligent and satisfying read.' The Sunday Times 'A masterful study in Africa/UK relations which manages to be supremely uncomfortable without being cynical, and clever without being calculating.' Big Issue 'The Flood was chillingly predictive. My Cleaner is a calmer, happier novel. Yet a gnawing tragedy lies in the shadows, all the more poignant for the deftness with which it's brushed aside.' The Independent
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 28, 2012
ISBN9781846591327
My Cleaner
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.

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Rating: 3.653846215384615 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

39 ratings2 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "She and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same"By sally tarbox on 2 January 2018Format: Kindle EditionMaybe 2.5* for a readable, if really rather silly, bit of chick-lit.Vanessa is a lecturer in Creative Writing and rather a sloane ranger type, with her materialistic, fashionable London life. But her 22 year old son Justin is lying in bed with some sort of breakdown, and Vanessa invites her old cleaner, who helped bring him up, back to the home from Uganda, to help.And so the stage is set for an implausible tale. Inevitable tensions between Vanessa - unpleasant, stingy, jealous - and Mary - forced to occupy a subordinate role, but very much her own person.The glimpses of Mary's life in Uganda were quite interesting, but I just didn't buy the interplay of the two women.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My Cleaner studies the relationship between two women with much more in common than either of them suspects. Vanessa is a sixtyish English woman, solidly middle class, a writer with two novels and several successful Pilates books to her credit who now teaches creative writing, the divorced mother of a son. Mary is a younger Ugandan woman, college educated, linen supervisor in a hotel in Kampala, also the divorced mother of a son, who once worked for several years as Vanessa's cleaner. When Vanessa's son Justin has a nervous breakdown, she appeals to Mary to return to England to help him. Mary realizes that she can save most of the money she makes in England and use it for a better life with her boyfriend and for the girls in her village.The two women do not like each other. Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationship with Justin, but Mary mothered Justin when he was a baby and Vanessa was too busy. In fact, Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationships with everybody and spends a good bit of her time shoring up her own shaky ego. Mary, on the other hand, lost her son to her husband when they divorced, and although she was devoted to him, she was not able to spend a lot of time with him when he was a baby because she was taking care of Justin. Now Jamil (or Jamey or Jamie - Does Mary not know how he spells his name?) has disappeared, and Mary is as fearful for him as Vanessa is for Justin. Mary sees Vanessa as out of touch with reality, a small woman swamped by her possessions, spoiled, and too self-indulgent to be of any use in the world.What ensues is a charming, funny, touching journey to self-understanding and accommodation through misunderstandings and deception. Maggie Gee's writing is pitch-perfect, understated, and insightful. As Mary and Vanessa haggle over money, she writes, "They are a breath apart, with the world between them." I thought before I wrote this that I liked the book very much. Now I believe I love it.

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My Cleaner - Maggie Gee

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