Michéle Roberts – författare

In the parched soil of Provence, a fifth gospel has been discovered, Mary Magdalene's account of Jesus' teaching and her relationship with him. It is a book of revelation, for it unveils a new Christianity, one which embraces the female equally with the male and acknowledges and celebrates women's spirituality. A passionate story of love and search, of separation and rebirth, The Secret Gospel imagines an alternative history for the much maligned Mary Magdalene, where she runs away from her family but returns to be captivated, both emotionally and theologically, by Jesus. The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene is a brilliant and moving vision of Christianity that is also startlingly modern in its conclusions.

The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling.Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes.In this book, Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love. Delving into four key texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures.Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.

Exploring a host of female parts, rites of passage, love, loss, danger, revelations, strange relationships, the pleasures and pains of growing up female, a fantastic collection of short stories from some of the best women writers today dealing with all aspects of female life from youth to old age.Includes stories from: Hilary Bailey, Sally Cameron, Betzy Dinesen, Souad Faress, Chrissie Gittins, Bonnie Greer, Vicky Grut, Kirsty Gunn, Brigid Howarth, Mizzy Hussain, Geraldine Kaye, Carolyn Patrick, Ellen Phethean, Kate Pullinger, Stella Rafferty, Ravinder Randhawa, Máire Ní Réagáin, Michéle Roberts, Daphne Rock, Elisa Segrave, Kirsty Seymour-Ure, Susanna Steele & Karen Whiteson.

Friendship has its own distinctive seasons, constantly changing and evolving, just as the years revolve. Cooking for a friend, you can show your affection in a direct, practical way. Composing a menu to suit or intrigue a particular beloved person, you are demonstrating how well you understand and appreciate them.This book is divided into three overlapping seasons, following the 1929 classic La bonne cuisine by Madame Saint-Ange. In each section you will find dishes and suggestions appropriate to the season as well as ideas for particular seasonal moments, such as sardine baguettes à la Colette, designed to be packed into bicycle baskets for picnics. The recipes are designed to be straightforward to follow so you can concentrate on your guest rather than dashing between stove and table.This is a book to stimulate your appetite to invite a dear friend round as soon as possible and cook for them.

An enduring delight for readers and cooks alike.' - Nigella Lawson'So manymicro feasts, and every one of them nourishment for body and soul.' - RachelCooke, author of Kitchen PersonWhether cooking for one on a daily or an occasional basis, cooking well foryourself means cherishing yourself and your appetites, joyously giving yourselfpleasure, opening yourself to new experiences. This book will encourage you todo all that. - M. R.A unique work of literary and culinary joie de vivre, part food memoir,part recipe book, French Cooking for One is Michele Roberts' firstcookbook, and a personal and quirky take on Edouard de Pomiane's ten-minutecooking classic. Once a food writer for the New Statesman, Roberts wasborn in 1949 and raised in a bilingual French-English household, learning tocook from her French grandparents in Normandy. Her love of food and cookery hasalways shone through in her novels and short stories.French cuisine, classic though it is, stillholds delicious surprises. From quick bites for busy days to sumptuous maincourses for those who enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, the focusthroughout is on dishes that are simple and fun to prepare, and results thatare mouthwatering to contemplate and, of course, to eat.With over 160 delicious recipes, the majorityof which are vegetarian, combined with piquant storytelling and feminist wit,French Cooking for One is a working cook's book with French flair, burstingwith life and illustrated with the author's original ink drawings, full ofcharm and humour.More than a handbook of classic Frenchdishes, French Cooking for One does something that few, if any,cookbooks do: it bears testimony to a singular literary life.Gorgeouslywritten vignettes of Roberts' childhood in Normandy and of her years living inPays de la Loire are peppered with anecdotes about intellectual and artisticluminaries: an omelette prepared by Gertrude Stein's cook for Picasso; a simplepasta dish calling to mind the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and theScottish poet Alison Fell's images of female orgasm; and Emma Bovary'sextraordinary wedding cake, among others.

From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a sensuous, evocative novel exploring the lives of women in Victorian London, for fans of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue and Kate Atkinson2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life. 1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels’ promises of pleasure – and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house.As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other – a breath at Madeleine’s neck, a voice in her head – the murmurs of ghosts echoing through time. Rendered in immediate, intoxicating prose, The Walworth Beauty is a haunting tale of desire and exploitation, isolation and loss, and the faltering search for human connection; this is Michèle Roberts at her masterful best.

Chosen as a Fiction Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph by Maggie O'FarrellIn this witty and subversive collection of stories, Michèle Roberts explores women's desires, memories and loves as only she can. A jilted woman skirts the edges of time and place as she walks the streets of London at night; another returns to the scene of her honeymoon without her husband; a wife takes apt revenge on her vegetarian husband . . .

Rebellion, revolution, experimental living, feminist communes, street theatre, radical magazines, love affairs - gay and straight - sex, drugs and rock and roll.Michèle Roberts, one of Britain's most talented and highly acclaimed novelists, now considers her own life, in this vibrant, powerful portrait of a time and place: alternative London of the 1970s and beyond. A fledgling writer taking a leap into radical politics, Roberts finds alternative homes, new families and lifelong friendships in the streets and houses of Holloway, Peckham, Regent's Park and Notting Hill Gate. From Spare Rib to publishing her first book, Paper Houses is Roberts' story of finding a space in which to live, love and write - and learning to share it.'Beguiling, enthusiastic, charming and vivid, this is an autobiography to be savoured' Amanda Craig, DAILY TELEGRAPH

Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeSecrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therèse and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war. Intrigued by adults' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village's buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

Subversive, sensual tales, wise and witty fictions; this collection of short stories from one of Britain's most acclaimed novelists is by turns shockingly delicious and soberingly disquieting. When mother is away taboos are breached, the untouchables embraced and the forbidden tasted.In 'Laundry' a poor, plain girl takes devilish pleasure in outwitting the pious monks and nuns she washes for. In the haunting, powerful fable 'Anger' a young woman, branded by fire at birth by her mother is scarred- and blessed- for life. In the highly sensuous 'Taking it Easy' a mother with writers block finds an escape from the slavery of her twin enemies by turning them into food for thought. And in the beautiful, arresting 'God's House' a young girl faces the ultimate mother's absence.

Freddy thinks he has committed matricide, and his fantasies - or perhaps realities - become stories which twist back through time to varying landscapes. He searches for a home, only to find it in an unexpected place. When able and allowed to return to the present, he can choose which tale to tell.

Always bold, always provocative, Michele Roberts turns now to the forbidden pleasures and pains of the love between father and daughter and unfolds before us the life and death of Saint Josephine. Holy woman or whore? Upholder of pious or pagan delights? Lowly nun or powerful miracle worker? Or both? And woven throughout her story are the heady and sometimes fearful tales of other female saints - one-armed mad girls, beauties locked in towers, seductive daughters - all women who didn't know their place. Rich with fabulous imagery, IMPOSSIBLE SAINTS is as potent and disturbing as its dangerous themes.'Her fictions are high-risk, unconventional, often apparently unstable; yet are steered with such authority that the otherwise cautious reader is taken almost without realising it into dangerous and exhilarating territory ... She is a writer dedicated to challenging the boundaries by which the idle and unthinking might try to circumscribe her' Rachel Cusk, Sunday Express'Hugely entertaining and genuinely thought-provoking' Julia Flynn, Sunday Telegraph

In the early 1800s, Louise, a French peasant woman, fearing she is about to die, calls for her priest. She has a secret to confess. Though the priest is impatient, she wants to tell her tale from the beginning. The story opens in Stoke Newington, London, in the 1780s, with Jemima Boote, arriving at Miss Mary Wollstonecraft's school. Jemima follows her beloved teacher to Paris wanting to be part of the erupting revolution and then - six months pregnant - retreats to the tiny village of Louise's youth. Her arrival coincides with that of another young mother-to-be, Annette, who has been sent by her parents to the country to hide her disgraceful pregnancy and to get over her infatuation with William, a young English poet. In an abandoned convent they take up their waiting: waiting for their babies, waiting for their men. While drawing hints and facts from the lives and secret affairs of two of the most famous and passionate figures of the late 18th century - Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordworth - the intriguing mystery surrounding these two women, is Michèle Roberts own fascinating creation.

In her place as maid to Madame Patin in the cafe next to the sea, orphan Genevieve becomes the breathless audience for her mistress's alarming folk stories, beginning with the one about the mermaid - the beauty who is also a monster - who must be killed. Genevieve happily falls into the patterns and ways of Madame Patin and contentedly cooks, cleans, gardens and serves the customers alongside her. Until, that is, Genevieve ripens to siren beauty. To avoid the mermaid's fate she must take flight. And she does, to a poet who has the hearts of all his women: his mother, his mistress, his niece, his niece's governess - and before long, his new maid's.

Playing Sardines - a game in the dark, a game about desire, about wanting, all whipped up in a tale about the erotic allure of recipes: a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists working out how to deal with a husband who snores; a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle; a child greedy for love who faces up to her demon of jealousy - just some of the characters who shape this wonderful collection. Women yearning for what they haven't got - prepared to be wily, deceptive, cunning and perverse - all these strategies for survival in love and life are deployed here to mouth-watering effect.

Adam is a writer, struggling to come to terms with the death of his painter father, Robert, and his difficult marriage to Catherine. Before he married Catherine, he had been the lover of her sister, Vinny. The classic menage a trois seems about to repeat itself, when Adam discovers his wife's father was less innocent than he had thought. Set mainly in contemporary London, partly in France, the action also harks back to the 1970's. The narrative evokes the style of the nineteenth century novelists and their themes: desire, guilt, pleasure. Pastoral landscapes alternate with those of the inner city and the past's interaction with the present is acted out by ghosts. The dead father haunts his son; in real life Vinny haunts her sister; and the whole novel is haunted by one of its great earliest exponents, Charlotte Bronte, and her passionate search for creative fulfilment.

An anthology of the winning entries in Chawton House Library's Jane Austen Short Story Award 2010 competition set up in 2009 to celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen's arrival in Chawton. The Library is a charity with a unique collection of books focusing on women's writing in English from 1600 to 1830. This collection, set in the home and working estate of Jane Austen's brother, provides the opportunity to study and savour the texts in their original setting.

Cut Out by Michèle Roberts is a lyrical tale of family secrets and self-discovery. Denis knows his mother kept things from him. His godmother, Clemence, knows the truth. In rich, sensuous prose, Roberts interweaves Denis's search for answers with Clemence's memories of the time she spent working for Matisse.