McGrath's book is about the first generation of people to take the information age for granted. First published in 1997, it explores the dreams, ambitions, aesthetics and assumptions of all the children growing up in the digital age.

Hard, soft & wet: The digital generation comes of age

Politics & Social Sciences

Melanie McGrath

Anthropology

Flamingo

Hopping

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Fourth Estate

The Long Exile : A True Story of Deception and Survival Amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic

History

Americas

4th Estate

Give Me the Child

Mel McGrath

HarperCollins Publishers, Limited

Nothing on the tundra rotted . . . The whole history of human settlement lay exposed there, under that big northern sky. There was nowhere here for bones to hide. On Craig Island, a vast landscape of ice north of the Arctic Circle, three travellers are hunting duck. Among them is expert Inuit hunter and guide, Edie Kiglatuk; a woman born of this harsh, beautiful terrain. The two men are tourists, experiencing Arctic life in the raw, but when one of the men is shot dead in mysterious circumstances, the local Council of Elders in the tiny settlement of Autisaq is keen to dismiss it as an accident. Then two adventurers arrive in Autisaq hoping to search for the remains of the legendary Victorian explorer Sir James Fairfax. The men hire Edie - whose ancestor Welatok guided Fairfax - along with Edie's stepson Joe, and two parties set off in different directions. Four days later, Joe returns to Autisaq frostbitten, hypothermic and disoriented, to report his man missing. And when things take an even darker turn, Edie finds herself heartbroken, and facing the greatest challenge of her life . . . `A blazing star of a thriller: vivid, tightly-sprung, and satisfying on all levels. Encountering Edie Kiglatuk, the toughest, smartest Arctic heroine since Miss Smilla, left me with that rare feeling of privilege you get on meeting extraordinary people in real life. A huge achievement' Liz Jensen, author of The Rapture 'Edie is an ingenious and original creation but the most addictive character is the Arctic itself' Sunday Telegraph

White Heat

Pan/Macmillan

Silvertown is the story of the life of author Melanie McGrath's grandmother, Jenny Page. As McGrath acknowledges, "It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn't. It belonged to Jenny". McGrath's achievement in the book is to make Jenny's very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a young girl, the London docks were the biggest port in the world, teeming with life and industry. By the time she was an old woman, all the docks were closed and the old East End was a part of history. Not that Silvertown encourages nostalgia. The descriptions of Jenny's impoverished childhood, of the pulling of all her teeth on her 17th birthday, of the sweatshop where she worked, are enough to make readers throw away any rose-tinted glasses they might be tempted to use. Very occasionally the dialogue in the book lapses into the "Cor, blimey, strike a light, guv'nor" kind of Cockney heard in so many bad British films of the black-and-white era. Largely, both dialogue and narrative combine to provide a remarkably convincing and lively portrait of an ordinary life rescued from oblivion and of a world that's gone.-- Nick Rennison

Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir (ISIS Reminiscence S.)

Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir (Isis Reminiscence Series)

True Crime

Isis Large Print Books

The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic

In 1922 an Irish-American adventurer named Robert Flaherty made a film about Inuit life in the Arctic. Nanook of the North featured a mythical Eskimo hunter who lived in an igloo with his family in a frozen Eden. Nanook’s story captured the world’s imagination. Thirty years later, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from the east coast of Hudson Bay to a region of the high artic that was 1,200 miles farther north. Hailing from a land rich in caribou and arctic foxes, whales and seals, pink saxifrage and heather, the Inuit’s destination was Ellesmere Island, an arid and desolate landscape of shale and ice virtually devoid of life. The most northerly landmass on the planet, Ellesmere is blanketed in darkness for four months of the year. There the exiles were left to live on their own with little government support and few provisions. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of Robert Flaherty, who never met his father. In a narrative rich with human drama and heartbreak, Melanie McGrath uses the story of three generations of the Flaherty family—the filmmaker; his illegitimate son, Josephie; and Josephie’s daughters, Mary and Martha—to bring this extraordinary tale of mistreatment and deprivation to life.

KNOPF

Killer Women

Tamar Cohen

LAURA WILSON

Erin Kelly

Sarah Hilary

Jane Casey

Helen Smith

Louise Voss

D.E. Meredith

K. T. Medina

Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir

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Books by Melanie McGrath