<div>One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2017 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 From the great British novelist Dame Margaret Drabble comes a vital and audacious tale about the many ways in which we confront aging and living in a time of geopolitical rupture. Francesca Stubbs has an extremely full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives “restlessly round England,” which is “her last love . . . She wants to see it all before she dies.” Amid the professional conferences that dominate her schedule, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home cooked dinners to her ailing ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the shocking death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a flood plain in the West Country. Fran cannot help but think of her mortality, but she is “not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee.” She still prizes her “frisson of autonomy,” her belief in herself as a dynamic individual doing meaningful work in the world. The Dark Flood Rises moves between Fran’s interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. In both places, disaster looms. In Britain, the flood tides are rising, and in the Canaries, there is always the potential for a seismic event. As well, migrants are fleeing an increasingly war-torn Middle East. Though The Dark Flood Rises delivers the pleasures of a traditional novel, it is clearly situated in the precarious present. Margaret Drabble’s latest enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Alas, there is undeniable truth in Fran’s insight: “Old age, it’s a fucking disaster!”</div>

The Dark Flood Rises

<div>The prize-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises offers an &ldquo;absorbing&rdquo; portrait of three generations of women&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s granddaughter finds herself listening to a lecture on genetics and biological determinism. She has returned to Breaseborough and wonders at the families who remained in the humble little town where Bessie grew up. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the plain South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself&mdash;not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden and unexplained resurgence. With The Peppered Moth, the acclaimed author of The Seven Sisters conjures a captivating work of semi-fiction, grappling with her memory of her own mother and the indelible mark of family and heredity.</div>

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The Peppered Moth

<div>From the Golden PEN Award&ndash;winning author: A &ldquo;well-written, entertaining&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she&rsquo;s a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She&rsquo;s impatient and choked by domesticity; he&rsquo;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&rsquo;s to star in two plays during the city&rsquo;s festival season. It&rsquo;s here, far removed from the highbrow stimulation of the city, that Emma&rsquo;s resentment of David&mdash;his long hours, his expectations, his ego&mdash;finally boils over. Bored and lonely, she falls into the arms of the theater&rsquo;s director, an indiscretion that triggers a series of surprises neither Emma nor David could have foreseen. Narrated by a complicated, fascinating, and fiercely intelligent woman at the end of her rope, The Garrick Year is &ldquo;a witty, beautiful novel . . . written with extraordinary art&rdquo; (The New York Times). &ldquo;[A] romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies . . . deliciously bitter . . . so alive.&rdquo; &mdash;The New Yorker &ldquo;Unsparing . . . a very knowing, diverting entertainment.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews</div>

The Garrick Year

<div>An archaeologist struggles to unearth her own true passions in the &ldquo;richest, most absorbing novel&rdquo; by the author of The Dark Flood Rises (Joyce Carol Oates). Frances Wingate is one of England&rsquo;s most renowned archaeologists, having recently discovered a lost city in the Saharan desert. On the outside, she appears to have it all. But beneath the surface, the scientist deals with the demands of children and family&mdash;as well as a tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance with a married historian. It&rsquo;s only when Frances throws herself into her work that she discovers some surprising connections to others, in this novel about the search for meaning in life that is &ldquo;alive with ideas&rdquo; (Anatole Broyard, The New York Times).</div>

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The Realms of Gold

<div>A &ldquo;marvelous&rdquo; novel about a woman&rsquo;s psychological battle with the realities of midlife (The New York Times Book Review). Witty and endearingly neurotic, Kate Armstrong has hit a certain age&mdash;and the crisis that goes along with it. She has a career as a successful journalist, specializing in feminist issues, but she struggles to challenge herself at work. She&rsquo;s a mother, but her children have all left the nest, and her marriage has ended in divorce. She has a lively circle of friends, but her relationships with them are complicated by years of history and failed affairs. She&rsquo;s left one stage of life behind and has another stage ahead of her, but right now she&rsquo;s stuck somewhere in the middle. With her &ldquo;unfailing insight and intelligence,&rdquo; Margaret Drabble shows us a woman alone in London for the first time in years&mdash;slowly rediscovering herself in a city on the brink of great change (The New York Times).</div>

The Middle Ground

<div>This unique blend of memoir and history takes &ldquo;a multi-layered look at jigsaw puzzles . . . charming [and] fascinating&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Award-winning author Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries&mdash;for example, that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales&mdash;Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first trip to London together, the books they read, and the jigsaws they completed. With penetrating sketches of her parents, siblings, and children, Drabble shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, art and writing, aging and memory. And she does so with her customary intelligence, energy, and wit. </div>

The Pattern in the Carpet

<div>A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year: &ldquo;Part social satire, part thriller, and entirely clever&rdquo; (Elle). It is a midsummer&rsquo;s evening in the English countryside, and the three grown Palmer children are coming to the end of an enjoyable meal in the company of their partners and offspring. From this pleasant vantage point they play a dinner-party game: What kind of society would you be willing to accept if you didn&rsquo;t know your place in it? But the abstract question of justice, like all their family conversations, is eventually brought back to the more pressing problem of their eccentric mother, Frieda, the famous writer, who has abandoned them and her old life, and gone to live alone in Exmoor. Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure, a monster mother with a mysterious past. What is she plotting against them now? Has some inconvenient form of political correctness led her to favor her enchanting half-Guyanese grandson? What will she do with her money? Is she really writing her memoirs? And why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor finally driven her mad? The Witch of Exmoor brilliantly interweaves high comedy and personal tragedy, unraveling the story of a family whose comfortable, rational lives, both public and private, are about to be violently disrupted by a succession of sinister, messy events. &ldquo;Leisurely and mischievous,&rdquo; it is a dazzling, wickedly gothic tale of a British matriarch, her three grasping children, and the perils of self-absorption (The New Yorker). &ldquo;As meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times</div>

The Witch of Exmoor

<div>An &ldquo;engrossing&rdquo; novel following three women as they confront the darkness and danger of their world, by the author of The Radiant Way (People). Sweeping from smart London townhouses to a rundown embassy in the Middle East, from the splendors of the Mus&eacute;e d&rsquo;Orsay in Paris to drowsy afternoons in the hills of sunny Italy, this novel tells the intertwined stories of three Cambridge-educated women living in Margaret Thatcher&rsquo;s England. Whether it is a conscientious social worker&rsquo;s quest to befriend a convicted killer; an affair with a stranger after a husband&rsquo;s suicide; or an attempt to rescue a friend who&rsquo;s been kidnapped by terrorists, this is a novel rich with dramatic events and deeply intriguing characters who find the courage to persevere through trying times, in the hopes of finding some sort of justice and truth. &ldquo;[Drabble] invites us to see beyond the filth and horror of modern life to the world of possibilities in our own lives, where we also have the power to write our own endings.&rdquo; &mdash;Winnipeg Free Press &ldquo;The diverse plotlines develop amidst an abundance of social detail about 1980s Britain, providing a rich and fascinating texture. A winner.&rdquo; &mdash;Library Journal</div>

A Natural Curiosity

<div>A woman tries to uncover the mysterious fate of a friend in Cambodia in this &ldquo;very smart&rdquo; and suspenseful novel (The New York Times Book Review). Liz Headleand is one of London&rsquo;s best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she arrives at work to find a mysterious package, postmarked from Cambodia. Inside, she finds various scraps of paper, a laundry bill from a Bangkok hotel, old newspaper clippings&mdash;and pieces of human finger bones. Shocked but intrigued, she realizes the papers belong to her old friend Stephen Cox, a playwright who moved to Cambodia to work on a script about the Khmer Rouge. Convinced Stephen is trying to send her some sort of message, Liz follows the clues in the box to the jungles of Cambodia, risking her life to find her friend. In this thrilling novel, Margaret Drabble continues the trilogy she began in The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, taking us far from the civilized, familiar streets of London, and painting an &ldquo;urgent, brilliant&rdquo; portrait of the tumultuous, terror-ridden landscape of Cambodia in the late twentieth century (The Boston Globe). &ldquo;A tour de force.&rdquo; &mdash;Calgary Herald &ldquo;Unputdownable . . . A sojourn within The Gates of Ivory is not something one soon forgets.&rdquo; &mdash;Edmonton Journal</div>

The Gates of Ivory

<div>The story of an upper-middle-class unwed mother in 1960s London, from a novelist who is &ldquo;often as meticulous as Jane Austen and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh&rdquo; (Los Angeles Times). In a newly swinging London, Rosamund Stacey indulges in a premarital sexual encounter&mdash;and soon thereafter finds herself pregnant. Despite her fierce independence and academic brilliance, Rosamund is in fact na&iuml;ve 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;one of Britain&rsquo;s most dazzling writers,&rdquo; the award-winning author of The Dark Flood Rises, The Millstone captures both a moment in history when women&rsquo;s lives were changing dramatically and the timeless truths of the female experience (The New York Times Book Review). </div>

The Millstone

<div>Short fiction from &ldquo;a fastidious chronicler of the vagaries of women&rsquo;s lives in England since the early nineteen-sixties&rdquo; (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker). In stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural TV programs, and more, Margaret Drabble showcases her insight into the lives of women. This decade-spanning collection not only reveals how the female experience has&mdash;and hasn&rsquo;t&mdash;changed; it also demonstrates the talent that has earned Drabble multiple literary honors, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a Golden PEN Award, and made her &ldquo;one of the United Kingdom&rsquo;s finest contemporary fiction writers&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly, starred review). </div>

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

<div>An &ldquo;achingly wise&rdquo; novel about the challenges of motherhood: &ldquo;Admirers of Marilynne Robinson will find themselves very much at home in this book&rdquo; (The Wall Street Journal). Jessica Speight, an anthropologist in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair turns her into a single mother. Baby Anna is delightful&mdash;but with time it becomes clear that she is different from other children. Told from the point of view of Jess&rsquo;s fellow mothers, this is a movingly intimate look at the unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood. &ldquo;How do we treat the child who walks among us in a different way than most? In Margaret Drabble&rsquo;s hands the answer is with a depth of empathy few master.&rdquo; &mdash;Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones &ldquo;Moving and meditative . . . I found a kind of somber bravery in the story of this unwavering, intelligent woman and her guileless and beautiful child.&rdquo; &mdash;Meg Wolitzer, NPR&rsquo;s All Things Considered &ldquo;The Pure Gold Baby is a closely observed group portrait of female friends, a patient insight into the joys and pains of motherhood, and an image of how society has changed and how it has not.&rdquo; &mdash;Harper&rsquo;s Magazine</div>

The Pure Gold Baby

<div>An Englishwoman at a crossroads in her life takes an unexpected path in this &ldquo;teasingly clever new novel&rdquo; by the author of The Millstone (Publisher Weekly).Candida Wilton&mdash;a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters&mdash;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&rsquo;s putting herself through a survival test&hellip;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&mdash;widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then comes Candida&#39;s surprise inheritance, and the surprising things she chooses to do with it&hellip;</div>

Margaret Drabble
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Books By Margaret Drabble (13 Books)