Margaret Drabble

At the Pond invites readers into the tranquil yet vibrant world of the Kenwood Ladies' Bathing Pond, an oasis of natural beauty nestled on the outskirts of Hampstead Heath. This anthology weaves together a rich tapestry of personal recollections and historical musings, offering a unique glimpse into the lives of women who have found solace and camaraderie in these serene...

Francesca Stubbs holds our hand as we take a walk through old age and death. Fran brings us to drinks with her friends, dropping off suppers for her ex-husband, warm and cosy in his infirmity. She visits her daughter, holed up as the waters rise in a sodden West Country, and texts her son in Lanzarote, as he deals with...

Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although...

In her witty, masterful debut novel, Margaret Drabble conjures a gripping story of sibling rivalry. Louise, beautiful and sophisticated, marries wealthy novelist Stephen Fairfax. Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford, is thrown back into family matters. Louise's life becomes one of parties, gossip columns, and glamour. Sarah, now in London, begins to discover a newfound freedom, only glimpsing her sister's fashionable...

One hot summer afternoon in South Yorkshire, Faro sits at a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has travelled from London to the Northern mining town where generations of her family have lived and worked, to explore her own past. Decades before, in the early twentieth century, Bessie Bawtry also ponders her place in the world. A child of unusual determination...

You have seen them in parks, in supermarkets, at airports. They are the happy ones, and you notice them because they are happy. They smile at strangers, when you look at them their response is to smile. They were born that way, you say, as you go thoughtfully on your way. The Pure Gold Baby will raise your spirits and...

Ailsa and Humphrey met as children by a grey, northern sea in post-war Britain. She, freckled and furious; he, quietly studious; both fascinated by the other. Years later, their lives collide as adults and burst into an intense yet brief love affair. Now, after thirty years apart and at the close of the 20th century, their lives are converging once...

January 1987. Alix Bowen has moved away from London to Yorkshire. There, she regularly visits a mass-murderer in a high-security prison. But has her natural curiosity in his motives and character crept into obsession? Meanwhile, Alix's life continues to cross and uncross with her old friends Liz and Esther, now all in their fifties. As the years pass, they increasingly...

'Thames & Hudson's new, affordable, covetable 'Pocket Perspectives': beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers' Financial Times A highly acclaimed exploration of the way in which the landscape has both influenced and been represented in British Romantic literature. Margaret Drabble on the Romantics presents an image of Britain as seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated authors. Many...

The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally. Dr Babs Halliwell is no longer herself. A young girl is plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea. In her diaries, she chronicles the intrigues of courtly life and her own extraordinary existence. Two hundred years later, the Red Queen's ghost haunts Dr Babs Halliwell, an Oxford academic...

1979. Three old Cambridge friends are brought together at a party to celebrate New Year's Eve and the end of a decade. Esther, Liz, and Alix first met in Cambridge in the early Fifties, a time when their futures held glittering promise. But with the dawn of the Thatcher era, everything changed. Now middle-aged, how will these confident women cope...

Brought up in a suffocating, emotionless home in the north of England, Clara finds freedom when she wins a scholarship and moves to London. There, she meets Clelia and the rest of the brilliant and charming Denham family; they dazzle Clara with their gift for life, and Clara longs to be part of their bohemian world. But while she will...

Choked by domesticity and overshadowed by her husband's acting career, Emma is finding that life has reduced her to a supporting role. And when her husband lands his big break at a new theatre company, her want for something more boils over. Quietly radical and fiercely intelligent, The Garrick Year is a sharp and merciless dark comedy about marriage, motherhood,...

Simon Camish, a resentful and insecure barrister in a stifling marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Now, separated from her Greek husband, Rose lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from...

What do we owe to the past? What do we owe ourselves? Frances Wingate has it all, not least a flourishing career as an archaeologist and a razor-sharp mind. But when an old affair resurfaces—after years of on-again, off-again romance—she finds herself questioning everything she ever wanted out of life. In The Realms of Gold, Drabble crafts a luminous story...

Frieda Palmer – an eccentric, brilliant, and infuriating woman with a maddening disregard for convention – has withdrawn to a decaying house by the sea on the wild edges of Exmoor. Now, the question of which of her children will inherit her fortune looms large. But do any of them really deserve it? Set against the turbulent backdrop of post-Thatcherite...

‘One of Britain's most dazzling writers’ New York Times We all age differently, some stoically, some angrily, some calmly, some with an unfailing spirit of adventure and an undimmed curiosity. From one of our finest literary voices, The Great Good Places is a luminous collection of essays, stories and memoir that traverses the experience of growing older and looking back...

From the acclaimed writer Margaret Drabble come her short stories, in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from across four decades, she examines the intense private worlds and passions of everyday people. From one man's honeymooning epiphany in Hassan's...