My Driver is an entertaining, droll novel, executed with a lovely,
light touch. . . . Gee's control of tone is supremely artful.--Lionel
Shriver, Daily Telegraph
A tour de force--brilliantly structured, surprising, humane, and
suspenseful.--Elaine Showalter
Worldly, witty, enjoyable, impressive.--Doris Lessing
Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies from
London to Uganda for a Pan-African writers' conference. She also intends
to pay her former cleaner, Mary Tendo, a surprise visit. But Mary--now
the executive housekeeper of the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala--has her own
agenda, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa's beloved ex-husband
Trevor, a plumber, to her home village to help build a well.
The conference over, Vanessa sets off alone on a safari to the distant
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. Farce teeters
on the edge of something much darker when Vanessa quarrels with her
driver and a bloody war closes in on Bwindi from Congo. Can anyone save
her?
Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's original Best Young
British Novelists. She has published many novels to great acclaim,
including The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC
prizes, and My Cleaner and The Flood, which was longlisted for the
Orange Prize. She was the first female chair of the Royal Society of
Literature, and she lives in London.
