Telegram: My Cleaner: Reviews

'This beautifully observed, intelligent and moving novel is one of those rare things: a carefully wrapped surprise that gets better and better with the unravelling. Gee does not pull her punches. She has a strong message to put across about familial love and about awareness, or lack of it, of other cultures. But she is also exploring that very contemporary, post-feminist issue: how to balance home and a career.'

The Scotsman

'Like Margaret Atwood, Maggie Gee has always been prepared to tackle contemporary ideas on a grand as well as a domestic scale. Much of the joy of reading Maggie Gee derives from her ability to take control of a complex and multilayered narrative and render it as accessible and satisfying as a television soap. Her prose is rich and gossipy; it mixes the highbrow with the vernacular, and is, at times, shockingly cynical ... My Cleaner is a moving, funny, engrossing book.'

The Observer

'The Ugandan employee, Mary Tendo, and the English employer, Vanessa Henman, are each formidable parties in a hysterical, unending power struggle, in which Mary Tendo is often more domineering than her fussy, controlling employer ... My Cleaner is both simple and subtle. It is structured around an elegant juxtaposition of the inner lives of two opposites: its texture comes from the blunt repetition of their ungenerous thoughts, punctuated by occasional gusts of provisional warmth.'

TLS

'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 middle-class 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.'

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

'Maggie Gee's new novel is a smart satire on a subject central to most women's lives ... we either keep our houses clean, or pay someone else to do it. It's a queasy thought ... and [one] you will never brush casually aside again after reading My Cleaner.'

Daily Telegraph

'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

'Darkly comic.'

The Guardian

Paperback Reviews

'My Cleaner is a rich and humane domestic comedy, narrated in turn by two brilliantly-observed characters ... An engrossing and funny story about two women learning to live with each other again.'

The Independent

'Maggie Gee's indomitable women jostle for position on the page ... this is one of those rare books you want to begin again instantly, safe in the knowledge that it is quietly wonderful.'

The Telegraph

The critics say