The Mellow Madam and Other Stories

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.



(on previous work) A serious and important novelist.



(on previous work) Arditti is a master storyteller.



(on previous work) Arditti succeeds in creating fiction that is morally serious, moving and intense.



(on previous work) 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.



(on previous work) Thank God (maybe literally) for writers like Michael Arditti, whose invigorating novels dare to shake us out of our complacency.



(on previous work) Michael Arditti is a writer who takes risks. His material is always compelling and provocative, his techniques sophisticated and oblique.



(on previous work) A writer of quite exceptional gifts.



(on previous work) Arditti writes exactly like Dickens. He demands participation from the reader in an era of detachment.



(on previous work) Michael Arditti has long been one of our bravest novelists.



(on previous work) 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.



(on previous work) 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.



(on previous work) Arditti's fiction is serious, while at the same time touching, funny, thrilling, engrossing and never less than fascinating.



The tone and the mood of the stories are richly varied: at times, his writing verges on dark comedy; at others, it feels mythical and dramatic. I hope that people will enter into Arditti's world — and I suspect that the lives and faces that linger for each reader will reflect the stories that resonate most deeply with our lives and stories. Part of the beauty of what Arditti does is to invite us to find our full self and our true meaning in the lives that he creates and opens up for us.



I think these are brilliant. They are a mix of the everyday and the remarkable – quite dark in places and really cleverly assembled.