'The stories in this elegant book often pinpoint the places where morality and snobbery meet. ... Her writing is superbly assured, with a crystalline clarity and understated humour.' The Times

'The decent made indecent, the contented made complacent ... Gee presents the disjunction between intention and action in tightly compressed, almost epigrammatic narratives, little parables of human paradox.' Daily Telegraph

'United by Gee's ability to delineate personalities and adopt voices with small but accurate touches. ... These light sketches, filled with colour, offer glimpses into their small subjects' lives and wider insights into the familiar world that surrounds them.' Times Literary Supplement

'Gee exhibits an infallible ear for the faltering language of racial embarrassment ... she remains uniquely adept at suggesting human transience and impermanence. ... The stories build up into a picture of a world inhabited by characters who are uniquely Gee's.' Guardian

'Written with deceptive stylistic simplicity, complicated emotions are revealed in Maggie Gee's The Blue ... Each story casts an individual spell, but Gee has also threaded her themes into a powerful whole, bound up with the central metaphor of water representing freedom, relief and solace, capable of extinguishing life altogether - or saving it.' Mslexia Magazine

'A closely observed re-creation of the real world, invaded by images of hallucinatory strangeness ... A collection of stories in which the disjunction between characters' simplistic sense of their places in the world and the more complex situations in which they find themselves is repeatedly explored.' Sunday Times

'The Blue is an adventure ... the stories are by turns filmic, surprising, tragic, chilling, tender and sexy. ... Impressive, captivating and highly recommended.' Scotland on Sunday

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Last modified on November 23, 2006  | © Telegram 2005