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Mike Gayle Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Mike Gayle

Mike Gayle

Mike Gayle Biography

Mike Gayle was born and raised in Birmingham, UK. After earning a Sociology degree, he moved to London to become a journalist and ended up as an advice columnist for a teenage girls' magazine before becoming Features Editor for another teen magazine. He has written for a variety of publications including the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and Cosmo.

Mike became a full-time novelist in 1997 and has written thirteen novels, which have been translated into more than thirty languages. After stints in London and Manchester, Mike now resides in Birmingham with his wife, two kids, and a rabbit.

Mike Gayle's website

This bio was last updated on 06/29/2022. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Interview

An interview with Mike Gayle about his 2022 novel All the Lonely People about a Jamaican immigrant to the UK who rediscovers the world he'd turned his back on.

Your parents' immigrant story is the foundation of Hubert's story. What can you share with us about your parents' story?

Unlike Hubert, who arrived by boat from the West Indies in the late 1950s, my parents arrived a decade later by plane. Both Hubert's and my parents' generation came to the UK having been invited to do so by the government to help meet the labor shortage in the postwar years. Instead of being welcomed, however, they were met with racism and prejudice at every turn, some of it overt, some of it more subtle, but all of it a shocking reality check. The mother country that they had been taught about at school turned out not to be a very loving parent.

What made you want to write a story about a lonely person?

As Rose says in the book, "Loneliness is an epidemic," and I wanted to look at this phenomenon through a single character. One of the questions I was curious about was, how do lonely people become lonely people? Are they born or are they made? As we look across Hubert's life we see him leave his family in Jamaica, move countries, meet Joyce, start a new family, and then gradually, one by one, he loses his new family and his life empties out. There's nothing unusual about Hubert's story in a ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Mike Gayle at BookBrowse
All the Lonely People jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Mike Gayle but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

We recommend 10 similar authors


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