Jane and Malcolm Gray’s marriage is characterized by sexual unhappiness and the growing apathy they both feel toward one another. When Jane is confined to bed rest while pregnant with their second child, Malcolm realizes he must escape, leaving Jan...
"THE NEEDLE'S EYE is that rare thing, a book one wishes were longer than it is."
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Rose Vassiliou and Simon Camish meet at a friend's dinner party. He's a barrister in a loveless marriage, she's divorced, but ...
Attractive and witty, Sarah has just graduated from Oxford and started a new job at the BBC. As she immerses herself in the excitement of 1960s London, her beautiful older sister, Louise, marries the famous, though admittedly difficult, novelist Step...
An archaeologist struggles to unearth her own true passions in the “richest, most absorbing novel” by the author of The Dark Flood Rises (Joyce Carol Oates). Frances Wingate is one of England’s most renowned archaeologists, having recent...
A “marvelous” novel about a woman’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 -- and the crisis that goes along with it. She ...
Just thirty-eight-years-old, Anthony Keating’s already survived both a divorce and a heart attack. He has left the BBC for the dangerous life of property speculation in the boom-and-bust 1970s, and is brooding on the oil crisis, galloping inflation...
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 bo...
An “engrossing” 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 splendo...
A woman tries to uncover the mysterious fate of a friend in Cambodia in this “very smart” and suspenseful novel (The New York Times Book Review). Liz Headleand is one of London’s best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she a...
Margaret Drabble, herself much influenced by Angus Wilson's writing, traces his early years as a librarian at the British Library, interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park, and then his meteoric rise as novelist, critic...
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year: “Part social satire, part thriller, and entirely clever” (Elle). It is a midsummer’s evening in the English countryside, and the three grown Palmer children are coming to the end of an enjoyable...
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...
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 th...
On the cusp of a trip to Korea, Barbara Halliwell receives an unexpected package with no return address. Inside she finds a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess that details the mysteries of the Korean court as well as the dramas that left...
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 o...
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...
Based on the vastly popular Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Margaret Drabble, this indispensable volume offers over five thousand alphabetically arranged entries on individual novels, plays, songs, poems, novelists, poets, playwright...
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...
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 curios...
Jessica Speight, a young anthropology student in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair with her married professor turns her into a single mother. Anna is a pure gold baby with a delightful sunny nature. But a...
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 expe...