In the original dustsheet. Brown cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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Silvertown is the story of one East End family, across three generations, living on the fringe of the Thames. Silvertown itself is a ribbon of marshland that sits beside the King George VI dock near Bow Creek. In 1944 Melanie McGrath’s grandfather Lenny, bought the Cosy Café in Silvertown. From here Lenny, his mistress, his wife and his daughter served egg and chips, liver and bacon, eels and jellied custard to the passing trade from the thriving docks. Business was good. By the late forties Lenny was the only café owner in the East end to drive a Cadillac. Like many others on the fringes of the Thames in East London, the story of Melanie McGrath’s family is a tidal one. Originating from other parts, her family spilled into the area to take advantage of the docks and, having made a little money, spilled back out to the west again, headed for a better place. Fifty years on, Silvertown stares at the Millennium Dome square in the eyes. In the past half-century the Docklands terrain has been bombed, rebuilt, renovated, slum-cleared and finally razed pending ‘regeneration’. Overlooked by successive enterprise projects that have created the City Airport, Canary Wharf and the Dome itself, the waters of Silvertown sleep, awaiting a future that remains undecided. In Silvertown Melanie McGrath has, through the story of her family, recaptured this slip of land from its post-industrial depression, and with it the traditional heartlands of east London before each fades quietly from memory.

Reviews:

• Silvertown is the story of the life of author Melanie McGrath’s grandmother, Jenny Page. As McGrath acknowledges, “It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn’t. It belonged to Jenny”. McGrath’s achievement in the book is to make Jenny’s very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a young girl, the London docks were the biggest port in the world, teeming with life and industry. By the time she was an old woman, all the docks were closed and the old East End was a part of history. Not that Silvertown encourages nostalgia. The descriptions of Jenny’s impoverished childhood, of the pulling of all her teeth on her 17th birthday, of the sweatshop where she worked, are enough to make readers throw away any rose-tinted glasses they might be tempted to use. Very occasionally the dialogue in the book lapses into the “Cor, blimey, strike a light, guv’nor” kind of Cockney heard in so many bad British films of the black-and-white era. Largely, both dialogue and narrative combine to provide a remarkably convincing and lively portrait of an ordinary life rescued from oblivion and of a world that’s gone.–Nick Rennison

• ‘McGrath tells her story in a novelist’s idiom, and the result is extraordinarily powerful and curiously resonant. Like much of the East End, Silvertown today is in the process of an astonishing transformation. The curse on the area has been lifted. But McGrath has beautifully recorded the old Silvertown just before it disappears for ever.’ Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph

• In this remarkable book, award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives – Poplar, East Ham and Silvertown – are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, long since dead and already half forgotten.

• ‘Silvertown’ teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End. The page family, like most who fringed the Royal Docks, scraped a living ‘ducking and diving.’ To Jenny, born and bred in ‘the Abyss’, as Jack London famously described it, this was how life was. Len Page, who came from the Essex marshes, had other ideas. The story moves from the alleys and lanes of Poplar where eleven-year-old Jenny watches the men going off to fight in 1914, to the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; through the London docks, then the largest port in the world, to Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. And later, to the Cosy Café, from where Len and his mistress plot their escape; through to the closure of the docks and the catastrophic effect this has on the lives of this close-knit community. The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. But this evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates this lost East End and the struggles of those who lived there.

• The Author, Melanie McGrath is the author of two previous books, ‘Motel Nirvana’, and ‘Hard, Soft & Wet’. She is a regular contributor for the Guardian, Independent and the Express. She lives in Vauxhall, London.

Melanie McGrath is a Romford-born English non-fiction writer and crime novelist. Born in Romford, McGrath’s parents moved several times during her childhood; to Basildon in Essex, then to a village in Germany, to Kent, then north to Lancashire, and south again to Buckinghamshire. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University. She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1995 for her non fiction book Motel Nirvana, which examined the New Age movement, and detailed McGrath’s travels around the American states of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Her other non-fiction books have explored the “Information Age” (Hard, Soft and Wet), 20th century British social history, (Hopping and Silvertown) and the non-fiction book, The Long Exile about the High Arctic relocation.

In recent years McGrath has written crime novels, including a trilogy set in the Arctic with Inuit detective Edie Kiglatuk, and the standalone thriller Give Me the Child. As a book reviewer and travel writer, she has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent among other publications. McGrath has taught creative writing at the universities of Roehampton University and North Carolina as well as at The Arvon Foundation. McGrath lives in London and on the Kent coast.