Margaret Drabble
1) The Sea Lady
Author
Language
English
Description
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, Ailsa flying-they take stock of their lives over the past thirty years, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now...
Author
Language
English
Description
Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess. An appropriate gift indeed for her impending trip to Seoul, but Barbara doesn't know who sent it. On the plane, she avidly reads the memoir, a story of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the family dramas that left her childless...
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...
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English
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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
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
Language
English
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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
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
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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...
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Series
Language
English
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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
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English
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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
Language
English
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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...
Author
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English
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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,...
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Language
English
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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...
16) The radiant way
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Series
Language
English
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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,...
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English
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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...
18) The ice age
Author
Language
English
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Description
A constellation of lives in the hard-pressed England of the sixties and seventies, each at a crucial point of change. At the center: an energetic, interesting woman at midlife, a pretty ex-actress anxiously caring for her family while experimenting inside a new, generous, romantic relationship; and her lover, a handsome man of tact and feeling, dissatisfied with his past, leaving his respectable BBC job and entering the excitements and corruptions...
19) The waterfall
Author
Language
English
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Description
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...
20) The woodlanders
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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.