The Mellow Madam and Other Stories

Series

Name: Salt Modern Stories   Number: 16

Synopsis

From the septuagenarian prostitute exposed in a tabloid sting to the Queen Bee of a local dramatic society upstaged by her cleaner; from the nine-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of her parents’ divorce to the widow stranded on an Antarctic cruise during the COVID pandemic; from the doctor’s wife confronting the enormity of her husband’s online dealings to the forgotten musical comedy star yearning to return to the spotlight; these twelve captivating and compelling stories explore a diverse range of female experience. By turn humorous and poignant, whimsical and provocative, they make for richly rewarding reading.

Praise for Previous Work

‘A serious and important novelist.’ —Rose Tremain

‘Arditti is a master storyteller.’ —Observer

‘Arditti succeeds in creating fiction that is morally serious, moving and intense.’ —Times Literary Supplement

‘Anyone who is afraid that the English novel is sliding into a backwater of domestic anecdote should find their anxieties assuaged by the writing of Michael Arditti.’ —The Times

‘Thank God (maybe literally) for writers like Michael Arditti, whose invigorating novels dare to shake us out of our complacency.’ —The Spectator

‘Michael Arditti is a writer who takes risks. His material is always compelling and provocative, his techniques sophisticated and oblique.’ —Patricia Duncker, Independent on Sunday

‘A writer of quite exceptional gifts.’ —Time Out

‘Arditti writes exactly like Dickens. He demands participation from the reader in an era of detachment.’ —Scotland on Sunday

‘Michael Arditti has long been one of our bravest novelists.’ —The Tablet

‘There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels.bHe presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, caring about them, living and dying within their context … He is intelligent and thought-provoking and he does not let his reader off any hooks either.’ —Susan Hill, The Spectator

‘Michael Arditti is an unusual novelist for our time, and one who has become more ambitious and more assured over the years … Anyone who ventures into the dense jungle of his narrative will find much that is entrancing, much that is moving, and much that will provoke thought, even perhaps a revision of previously settled opinion and sense of values.’ —Allan Massie, The Scotsman

‘Arditti’s fiction is serious, while at the same time touching, funny, thrilling, engrossing and never less than fascinating.’ —Catholic Herald