BOOKS
Author Interview Mike Gayle
This year marks 25 years since the publication of Mike Gayle‘s first book, and now his 18th novel, a tale of lovers reunited, is set to delight his loyal readers
Alice O’Keeffe @aliceokbooks B
ack in October 1997, journalist and former teen magazine “agony uncle” Mike Gayle was in a London taxi with his literary agent on the way to meet his publisher for the first time. Hodder had recently acquired Gayle’s début novel My Legendary Girlfiend aſter a fierce auction and his agent was briefing him on what to expect from this first meeting. “And she said, ‘They’re going to ask you what your next book is about—have you got any ideas?’ I remember thinking, ‘My next book? What next book? This is literally everything I have to say about anything! There is no more!’” he says, laughing, over Zoom from his home in Birmingham. Fortunately for fans of his début, which was praised as “full of belly laughs and painfully acute observations” by the Independent on Sunday—and for Hodder, which has remained his publisher ever since—many more books followed.
A Song of Me &You, his 18th novel, opens with Helen—a middle-aged, part-time primary school teacher whose husband Adam has recently dumped her for a younger colleague—waving off her two teenage children when the insufferable soon-to-be-ex turns up in his Audi A3 to take them on holiday for a week, his new girlfriend in the passenger seat. Helen is at her lowest ebb when
16 31st March 2023
Photography: Simon Weller
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