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The Millstone
Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood. ‘Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine’ – Sunday Times
The Peppered Moth
The prize-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises offers an “absorbing” portrait of three generations of women—inspired by her own family (The New York Times Book Review). In the early 1900s, young Bessie Bawtry grows up in a mining town in South Yorkshire, England. Unusually gifted, she longs to escape a life burdened by unquestioned tradition. She studies patiently, dreaming of the day when she will take the entrance exam for Cambridge and leave her narrow world. A generation later, Bessie’s daughter Chrissie feels a similar impulse to expand her horizons, which she in turn passes on to her own daughter. Nearly a century after that, Bessie’s granddaughter finds herself listening t...
The Radiant Way
This novel goes back through the lives of three women, a psychoanalyst, an art historian and a good woman who all met at Cambridge in the 1950s.
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble is a writer whose subject matter and technique have developed profoundly since the early sixties: this book draws together the different aspects of her narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events. The often distanced and ironic narration is discussed, and shown to reinforce Drabble's recurrent themes - themes that include the effect of early family influence and heredity on free choice, the inexorable pressure of social changes, and the role of accident in destabilizing the confident individual. In the later novels people move in a world where they and others may be victims of a callous society, but may equally be guilty of condoning or promoting society's worst trends. This study describes how narrative increasingly becomes ambiguous, offering then withholding support for the behaviour of the characters, and challenging the reader to think again.
The Dark Flood Rises
NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017: ‘masterly’ GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: 'An absolute tour de force' Fran may be old but she's not going without a fight. So she dyes her hair, enjoys every glass of red wine, drives around the country for her job with a housing charity and lives in an insalubrious tower block that her loved ones disapprove of. And as each of them - her pampered ex Claude, old friend Jo, flamboyant son Christopher and earnest daughter Poppet - seeks happiness in their own way, what will the last reckoning be? Will they be waving or drowning when the end comes? By turns joyous and profound, darkly sardonic and moving, The Dark Flood Rises questions what makes a good life, and a good death. This triumphant, bravura novel takes in love, death, sun-drenched islands, poetry, Maria Callas, tidal waves, surprise endings - and new beginnings.
The Millstone
The story of an upper-middle-class unwed mother in 1960s London, from a novelist who is “often as meticulous as Jane Austen and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh” (Los Angeles Times). In a newly swinging London, Rosamund Stacey indulges in a premarital sexual encounter—and soon thereafter finds herself pregnant. Despite her fierce independence and academic brilliance, Rosamund is in fact naïve and unworldly, and the choices before her are terrifying. But in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds an unconditional love she has never known before—and as she navigates a situation still considered scandalous in her circles, she may discover that motherhood and independence need not be mutually exclusive. From “one of Britain’s most dazzling writers,” the award-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises, The Millstone captures both a moment in history when women’s lives were changing dramatically and the timeless truths of the female experience (The New York Times Book Review).
The Garrick Year
From the Golden PEN Award–winning author: A “well-written, entertaining” dark comedy of a marriage on the rocks in 1960s London (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times). Emma and David Evans seem to have a perfect life. He’s a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she’s a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She’s impatient and choked by domesticity; he’s narcissistic and unfaithful. Between the two of them is a privately combative marriage that has fed their want of drama. Then David relocates the family from their London home to provincial Hereford, where he’s to star in two plays during the city’s ...
The Pattern in the Carpet
In The Pattern in the Carpet the award-winning and beloved writer Margaret Drabble explores her own family story alongside the history of her favourite childhood pastime – the jigsaw. The result is an original and moving personal history about remembrance, growing older, the importance of play and the ways in which we make sense of our past by ornamenting our present.
The Seven Sisters
An Englishwoman at a crossroads in her life takes an unexpected path in this “teasingly clever new novel” by the author of The Millstone (Publisher Weekly). Candida Wilton—a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters—moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. The move, however, is not a financial necessity. She herself wonders if she’s putting herself through a survival test…or perhaps a punishment. How will Candida adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. An adult-ed class on Virgil offers friendships of sorts with other women—widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then comes Candida's surprise inheritance, and the surprising things she chooses to do with it…
