Novelist Maggie Gee鈥檚 The White Family (Saqi, 2002) has just been shortlisted for the Orange Prize. 鈥淎 thrill鈥�, she says, but she鈥檚 still finding time to wade through the two volumes of Bill Hamilton鈥檚 Narrow Roads of Gene Land (Oxford, 2001). Gee loves his flashes of visual poetry when describing plants or insects, and admires his cheerful refusal to take the scientific establishment鈥檚 procedures at face value.
Gee is also reading Francis Fukuyama鈥檚 Our Posthuman Future (Profile, 2002) with high hopes and she has just finished The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet (Serpent鈥檚 Tail, 2002). Writer Edmund White described this as 鈥渢he most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman鈥�. But Gee is unmoved by Millet鈥檚 descriptions of 鈥渢he plunging rod鈥�: 鈥淪ounds like trouble with the drains to me,鈥� she says.