The Seven Sisters — Margaret Drabble

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 three grown daughters -- 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's putting herself through a survival test…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 -- widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then comes Candida's surprise inheritance, and the surprising things she chooses to do with it…