Margaret Drabble

Sarah could not believe that her sister Louise, beautiful and brilliant Louise, arrogant and always-in-the-right Louise, was regularly sleeping with a man who was not her husband. Sarah had a lot to learn. About Louise. About marriage. About adultery. About love and lust and what they both mean to a woman. And learn she did -- with Louise as her personal teacher...

The story of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, as two rivals, Giles Winterbourne and Dr Edred Fitzpiers, compete for the hand of Grace Melbury.

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,...

At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. There she accepts her lowly status, and gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund. When the dazzling and sophisticated Henry and Mary Crawford arrive, Fanny watches as her cousins become embroiled in rivalry and sexual jealousy, she struggles to retain her...

Simon Camish, an embittered, diffident lawyer in a loveless marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Yet at one time she had been notorious -- her name constantly in the news. Now, separated from her Greek husband, she lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her slum house in a decaying...

Receiving the two-hundred-year-old memoir of a Korean crown princess from an anonymous sender, Oxford student Barbara Halliwell reads about the princess's life and finds profound changes occurring within her present-day London home.

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 Jane in the care of her dear friend and cousin, Lucy, and Lucy's husband James. After Jane gives birth, Lucy, and James alternate nights with her, and it is during this time alone together that Jane and James...