Two hundred years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen doesn’t want her extraordinary existence to be forgotten. Her long and privileged life behind the Korean palace walls was not all it seemed, and the R
The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not thinned yet." That is the emotional territory where sit, jelled, the four main characters of Drabb
Margaret Drabble’s affecting novel, set in London during the 1960s, about a casual love affair, an unplanned pregnancy, and one young woman’s decision to become a mother.
When circumstances compel her to start over late in her life, Candida Wilton moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room, walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London--and begins to pour her soul into a diary. Candida is
This is the story of Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman, who spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. As they journey back to Ornemouth to receive honorary degrees from a new university there—Humphrey on the train, Ai
In a “profoundly moving, intellectually acute” novel (Philadelphia Inquirer) that is “as meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh” (Los Angeles Times), Margaret Drabble conjures up a retired writer besieged by her three grasping childr
Anthony Keating is a middle-aged property developer in Yorkshire in the mid-seventies. Having escaped London's hustle-bustle and survived a heart attack aged just thirty eight, he awaits the return of his lover Alison, who is trying to help her daughter i
Twenty five years ago Liz, Alix and Esther were leading lights at Cambridge. Now they meet as old friends at a glittering New Year's Eve party to welcome in the 1980s. It is the dawn of the Thatcher era, and Britain is on the brink of great social and pol
Clara has broken away from the stifling respectability of her northern home to live her own life in London. Through her close friendship with Celia Denham she enters a world of dazzling educated people and wealthy bohemians. Clara yearns to be part of the
The insatiable passion to know drives virtually all the characters in A Natural Curiosity: Liz, united with her divorced husband to fnd their friend, Liz's sister Shirley, who learns the truth about their mother's life and death, and Alix, who visits with