of complex layered tales of physical and emotional displacement. According to one reviewer: "A magnificent sense of pacing is the first of Melville's skills that impresses the reader of this mesmerizing collection. The second is her gift for voices ... she has an amazing range, from West Indians in London celebrating carnival, to the self-conscious, resentful Macusi Indian brought by her literal-minded British husband to a wedding in London, to the irritable Canadian wife whose husband has been sent to Guyana for two years to serve as unofficial liar for a mining corporation. Magic realism is the label most readers and critics will paste on Melville's work ... it is an appropriate but incomplete description. The dozen stories spill over with musical chaos and sly humor.... The magic in Melville's eccentric tales is neither good nor bad, white nor black, but the magic of the teeming pluralness and the many possibilities of life." Eating Air (2009) Melville's novel Eating Air, published in 2009, was called by The Independent "a virtuoso performance, playing with a gallimaufry of characters". Lavinia Greenlaw wrote in the Financial Times: "The world of Pauline Melville’s fiction is one in which people slip in and out of place. It is full of shadows, transgressions and dark secrets. In her second novel, Eating Air, it is a remarkably wide world, flitting from south London to Italy, Brazil to Surinam, across the past 30 years. ... What makes this novel compelling is the way one person leads us to the next, and how we move out of the frame only to find ourselves back at the centre. ...Melville does not need to rely on rhetoric or charm. Her clean style and detached vision allow us to concentrate on what these people actually do as opposed to what they set out to do. This is a book about the difference between intention and action – and how we are acted upon far more than we know." The Master of Chaos and Other Fables (2021) Of her most recent book, The Master of Chaos and Other Fables, Salman Rushdie was quoted as saying: "In this virtuoso performance, Pauline Melville shows us a world in upheaval, and reminds us that that's where we live." Benjamin Zephaniah writing in Vogue magazine praised the collection, saying: "There is love, politics, compassion, magic, and humour." Selecting "Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides" from