Vanessa Henman, a plucky but accident-prone white writer, flies out from London to Uganda for an African writers’ conference. She also means to visit her former cleaner, Ugandan Mary Tendo, now the successful Executive Housekeeper of Kampala’s up-market Sheraton Hotel. But Mary has her own agenda: her son Jamil is missing, and she has secretly summoned Vanessa’s beloved ex-husband Trevor, a plumber, to her home village to build a new well. Vanessa sets off alone on safari to distant Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see the mountain gorillas. But 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? Will Mary Tendo find her son? This swift, sparkling and sharp-edged book juxtaposes dazzling comedy and danger in Maggie Gee’s most original work yet.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The behaviour of the British abroad has always been a rich seam for satire. Nowhere more so than in Africa, where Westerners are invariably portrayed as boorish, culturally tone deaf or insufferably naive. Maggie Gee’s new novel, My Driver, transcends this cliched political correctness. By meshing her characters-both white and black-in a web of suppressed longings, Gee gives this modern-day fairytale real emotional force. Most refreshingly, Gee’s backdrop of contemporary Uganda rings true. This is a writer who clearly her way through central Africa’s alphabet soup of rebel groups, and who has a clear-eyed grasp of the scramble for money and power that drives the region’s wars. …Gee’s novel is an admirable success. –Matthew Green, Financial times, Saturday 11th April 2009
Maggie Gee’s last novel, My Cleaner, concerned a beloved Ugandan domestic. Mary Tendo was imported from her homeland to Britain to cheer up her former employer’s depressive adult son, whom she cared for as a child. Gee’s charming new novel, My Driver, is technically a sequel, but deftly reprises the back story, and makes for a satisfying stand-alone read. My Driver is an entertaining, droll novel, executed with a lovely light touch. Gee manages to expose the many foibles of her characters without subjecting them to ridicule or inviting the reader’s outright dislike. Gee’s control of tone-light but never giving over to pure comedy- is supremely artful. –Lionel Shriver in the Telegraph Review, Saturday April 18th 2009.
About the Author
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, My Cleaner and The Flood, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and Grace (p. 27 – all Telegram). She was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in London.
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