Margaret Drabble

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-for example, that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales-Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their...

Liz Headleand, Esther Breuer, and Alix Bowen have been friends since Cambridge. Twenty-five years later, life has led them all down very different paths. Liz is a successful and well-known psychiatrist with a full social life. Esther, an eccentric bohemian, is a renowned professor of Italian art. Alix, a Socialist, teaches English in a London prison. Over the course of five years, their lives are marked by affairs, divorce, remarriage, sexual exploration,...

Liz Headleand is one of London'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-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...

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of...

Margaret Drabble's novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony-all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural...

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,...

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, Ailsa flying-they take stock of their lives over the past thirty years, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now...

Frances Wingate is one of England'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-as well as a tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance with a married historian.