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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
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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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