Melanie McGrath – författare

A chilling true story of deception and survival set amidst the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic.In 1922 the Irish-American explorer Robert Flaherty made a film called ‘Nanook of the North’ which captured the world's imagination. Soon afterwards, he quit the Arctic for good, leaving behind his bastard son, Joseph, to grow up Eskimo.Thirty years later a young, inexperienced policeman, Ross Gibson, was asked by the Canadian government to draw up a list of Inuit who were to be resettled in the uninhabited polar Arctic and left to fend as best they could. Joseph Flaherty and his family were on that list. They were told they were going to an Arctic Eden of spring flowers and polar bears. But it didn't turn out that way, and this, Joseph Flaherty's story, tells how it did.

A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.

The sequel to the bestselling Silvertown, which tells the story of Aunt Daisy, and all the other Aunt Daisys – the locals of the old East End.For more than a century, ‘hopping’ was the main event in the East End calendar – an annual expedition of over 200,000 East Enders out to the Kentish countryside to look for casual work picking hops and stripping bines.Aunt Daisy was one of those day trippers. For her, the train ride from London Bridge to Faversham was a kind of magic that she always passed in a rush of sensation. To be away from the tight hustle of the city and lose herself in the open spaces and pollen mists of the Kentish summer provided her with a succour that would last her through the long winters back in London. Her delicate demeanour had never really suited the smutty terraces of the East End; rather she considered herself a countrywoman who just so happened to be stranded in the city.Married young and yet not unhappily to Harold Baker, a closet homosexual who would never consummate their union, at some early point she wrote an escape clause into her life that shielded her from her life's difficult realities. It was this resolve, a kind of armour born out by her dreamy nature, that more than anything else marked Aunt Daisy out as an East Ender.Thoughtful, moving and beautifully rendered, Hopping captures the essence of ordinary family lives often obscured from history during an extraordinary period in London's past. Regardless of era or circumstance, chartering the shift of the East End from a hive of poverty whose dimmed population toiled daily at the docks, to a Blitzed-out community that defiantly rose to confront the brutalities of World War II, through to the gamble and risk emanating from behind the glass and steel towers of today's Canary Wharf, Hopping stands as testament to the true East Ender disposition – an agility of spirit to endure your lot and get by.

The sequel to the bestselling Silvertown, which tells the story of Aunt Daisy, and all the other Aunt Daisys – the locals of the old East End.For more than a century, hopping was the main event in the East End calendar – an annual expedition of over 200,000 East Enders out to the Kentish countryside to look for casual work picking hops and stripping bines.Aunt Daisy was one of those day trippers. For her, the train ride from London Bridge to Faversham was a kind of magic that she always passed in a rush of sensation. To be away from the tight hustle of the city and lose herself in the open spaces and pollen mists of the Kentish summer provided her with a succour that would last her through the long winters back in London. Her delicate demeanour had never really suited the smutty terraces of the East End; rather she considered herself a countrywoman who just so happened to be stranded in the city.Married young and yet not unhappily to Harold Baker, a closet homosexual who would never consummate their union, at some early point she wrote an escape clause into her life that shielded her from her life's difficult realities. It was this resolve, a kind of armour born out by her dreamy nature, that more than anything else marked Aunt Daisy out as an East Ender.Thoughtful, moving and beautifully rendered, Hopping captures the essence of ordinary family lives often obscured from history during an extraordinary period in London's past. Regardless of era or circumstance, chartering the shift of the East End from a hive of poverty whose dimmed population toiled daily at the docks, to a Blitzed-out community that defiantly rose to confront the brutalities of World War II, through to the gamble and risk emanating from behind the glass and steel towers of today's Canary Wharf, Hopping stands as testament to the true East Ender disposition - an agility of spirit to endure your lot and get by.

A chilling true story of deception and survival set amidst the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic.In 1922 the Irish-American explorer Robert Flaherty made a film called `Nanook of the North’ which captured the world's imagination. Soon afterwards, he quit the Arctic for good, leaving behind his bastard son, Joseph, to grow up Eskimo.Thirty years later a young, inexperienced policeman, Ross Gibson, was asked by the Canadian government to draw up a list of Inuit who were to be resettled in the uninhabited polar Arctic and left to fend as best they could. Joseph Flaherty and his family were on that list. They were told they were going to an Arctic Eden of spring flowers and polar bears. But it didn't turn out that way, and this, Joseph Flaherty's story, tells how it did.

Melanie McGrath’s critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in ebook format.In this remarkable book, award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar, East Ham and Silvertown – are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, long since dead and already half forgotten.Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and lanes of Poplar in 1914, where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks, then the largest port in the world; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Café, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len – later a home to their troubled marriage – and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close knit community.The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there.

Now available in ebook format. `Motel Nirvana’ is Melanie McGrath’s first published book.A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.`Motel Nirvana’ won the 1996 John Llewellyn Rhys `Mail on Sunday’ prize for the best new British writer under 35.

First published in 1997 and now available as an ebook.Who are the digital generation? They are the millions of youngsters who live with, and love, the technology with which they are growing up. This is their story. Tomorrow belongs to them.`This is the book which opens up the electronic frontier to those still left out in the cold, the one McLuhan would have written were he to be still surfing the Nineties’ Arena. `At once a romance, a cultural commentary, and a piece of travel writing which adds the virtual world to its itinerary as though it were a new place on the map. ` Sadie Plant, The TimesNot another book about youth culture, nor cyberpunks, hackers and VR; not a computing manual; not the history of technology; but a book about the first generation of people to take the information age for granted.A personal portrait of the Wired Generation, exploring the dreams, ambitions, aesthetics and assumptions of all the kids growing up digital, worldwide.In these days of video games, PCs, multimedia and personal stereos, it’s all too easy for the sensitive kids to disappear into worlds of their own, and it happens so quickly — one birthday they’re chirpy and sociable, the next they stay home to watch Robocop for the thirty-seventh time or play Mortal Kombat yet again.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA NON-FICTION CROWN, THE ANDRÉ SIMON FOOD BOOK AWARDS AND THE FORTNUM & MASON BOOK AWARDS'Filled with hearty goodness and packed together with care, this will go down a treat' Evening Standard | 'Rich and compelling' Spectator | 'Extraordinary and very moving' Julian Fellowes | 'Beautifully written, carefully researched, wonderfully told' Danny WallaceThe fascinating history of an iconic East End institution from the bestselling author of Silvertown, Melanie McGrath. G Kelly's Pie and Mash has been run by the same family in the Roman Road in Bow for nearly a hundred years; an East End institution and the still point of a turning world. Outside its windows the Roman Road has seen an extraordinary revolution - from women's liberation and industrialisation to wars and immigration - and yet at its heart it remains one of the last traditional market roads of London.Pie and Mash down the Roman Road is the biography of that shop and of the people - customers, suppliers, employees, owners - who passed through it, and continue to do so. Through vivid tales of ordinary lives the book tells the extraordinary story of the community living around the oldest trading route in Britain, and the true heart of the East End.'Draws you right into the heart of the vibrant East End community' Rosie Hendry'Pacey and breath-taking . . . I loved every word' Carol Rivers