Maurice Gee: A Literary Companion: The Fiction for Young Readers

Abstract

This book is the first in a two-volume series discussing the fiction of Maurice Gee. Over a career that spans 55 years so far, Gee has published 17 novels and more than 20 short stories for adult readers, and 13 novels for younger readers. These fictions create a variety of worlds. Denis Welch, in reviewing Gee's sixteenth novel for adults, 'Blindsight', in 2005, made a case for looking at all of Gee's fiction written for adults as creating a single, evolving fictional world, 'Geeland': 'a country of the mind that novel by novel has taken shape in our literary consciousness, to the point where - like the lifesize map in the Borges story that eventually covers and fits the actual land - it's almost indistinguishable from New Zealand'.