Margaret Drabble
Author
Language
English
Description
Francesca Stubbs has an extremely full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives "restlessly round England," which is "her last love . . . She wants to see it all before she dies." Amid the professional conferences that dominate her schedule, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home cooked dinners to her ailing ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the shocking death of his...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2013.
Language
English
Formats
Description
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.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
An eccentric English grandmother as seen by her children. One of the more disturbing aspects of Frieda Palmer, a wealthy freethinker and political crusader, is that she has sold the family house to live as a hermit. The children are worried she might blow the rest of the inheritance.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Emma and David Evans seem to have a perfect life. He's a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she's a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She's impatient and choked by domesticity; he's narcissistic and unfaithful. Between the two of them is a privately combative marriage that has fed their want of drama.
Then David relocates the family from their London home to provincial...
Author
Language
English
Description
Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's passionate tale of the beautiful, headstrong farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, firmly established the thirty-four-year-old writer as a popular novelist. According to Virginia Woolf, "The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which . . . must hold its place among the great...
Author
Publisher
Harcourt
Pub. Date
2002.
Language
English
Description
In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town...
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Description
A single-volume compilation of the author's previously uncollected short works offers insight into her use of irony, female friendships, and personal passions and is complemented by an introduction that places her works in a context of her life and novels.
Author
Series
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
1989.
Language
English
Description
Sweeping from smart London townhouses to a rundown embassy in the Middle East, from the splendors of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to drowsy afternoons in the hills of sunny Italy, this novel tells the intertwined stories of three Cambridge-educated women living in Margaret Thatcher's England. Whether it is a conscientious social worker's quest to befriend a convicted killer; an affair with a stranger after a husband's suicide; or an attempt to rescue...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
1975.
Language
English
Description
Drabble strikes gold with this novel about a famous archaeologist who is passionately in love with a married, slightly mad and very moral man. Alive with feeling and intelligence, endearing characters and feminist insights, this is one of the very best by an immensely gifted author.
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2009.
Language
English
Description
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...
16) The radiant way
Author
Series
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1987.
Language
English
Description
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,...
Author
Publisher
Morrow
Pub. Date
1966.
Language
English
Description
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,...
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1980.
Language
English
Description
A novel about a woman's psychological battle with the realities of midlife.
Witty and endearingly neurotic, Kate Armstrong has hit a certain age-and the crisis that goes along with it. She has a career as a successful journalist, specializing in feminist issues, but she struggles to challenge herself at work. She's a mother, but her children have all left the nest, and her marriage has ended in divorce. She has a lively circle of friends, but...
19) Northanger Abbey
Author
Language
English
Description
Northanger Abbey was among the last of Jane Austen's novels to be published, in 1818, but the first to be written, mostly in 1798-9. Centred on the loves and friendships of Catherine Morland, an endearing young girl extremely fond of novel-reading, it remains the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's novels. During an eventful season in Bath, Catherine meets the sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney who invite her to stay at their father's...
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1972.
Language
English
Description
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...