"McGrath is a cool-eyed chronicler of a dispossessed generation – philosophical, astute and ultimately unforgiving. This is no pseudo rock'n'roll road trip, but an accessible and insightful study of the modern condition. The final autobiographical chapter is breathtaking."
DEBORAH BOSLEY, 'Literary Review'

"McGrath meets the nation's lost souls of the New Age. A 267-year-old princess from the tribe of Atlantis, a technoshaman, an alien who talks to Barbie dolls, an overweight angel and a prince who will never die all impress her with their certainties as much as they depress her with their chronic self-awareness. It's an ambitious debut: McGrath has a keen sense for deadpan descriptions of off-kilter encounters, and an acute knack for deflating the Myth."
EMER BRIZZOLARA, 'Ikon'

"Fortifying herself with booze, cigarettes and a useful amount of asperity and common sense, McGrath painstakingly trawls the aisles of the spiritual supermarket. She writes beautifully about the terrain, offers deliciously dyspeptic observations…and is very funny on the sense of spiralling dislocation which arises from being confronted not just with unfamiliar behaviour but with 'an entirely inner architecture'."
MICK BROWN, 'Daily Telegraph'

McGrath has a fine, questing mind, a splendid eye for detail and a healthily cynical attitude. Confronted at every turn – in her deliciously sardonic picaresque travelogue through America's south-western desert states – by the strange, the sinister and the just plain barmy…she maintains a fine, dense and colourful narrative that brings the desert landscape and the loony-tune New Agers vividly to life."
NICK CURTIS, 'Financial Times'

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.

In 1952, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from their flourishing home on the Hudson Bay to the barren, arctic landscape of Ellesmere Island, the most northerly landmass on the planet. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, director of "Nanook of the North." In a narrative rich with human drama, Melanie McGrath follows three generations of the Flaherty family--Robert, Josephie, and Josephie's daughters--to bring this extraordinary tale of deception and harsh deprivation to life.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA NON-FICTION CROWN, THE ANDRE 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 Wallace The 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