Margaret Drabble

Her promising career in 1960s London interrupted by an affair with a married professor that renders her a single mother, Jessica Speight faces wrenching questions about responsibility, potential, and compassion when her sunny child reveals unique needs.

"In the final months of Jane Austen's life, she began work on a new novel about social drama in the small seaside town of Sanditon, once a small fishing village and now a bustling spa town. In the story of Charlotte Heywood, a new arrival, Austen contemplated a changing society with a mixture of skepticism and amusement, and notably crafted her only character of color in the mixed-race heiress Miss Lambe. Though unfinished at the time of her death,...