Margaret Drabble

An “achingly wise” novel about the challenges of motherhood: “Admirers of Marilynne Robinson will find themselves very much at home in this book” (The Wall Street Journal).
 
Jessica Speight, an anthropologist in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair turns her into a single mother. Baby Anna is delightful—but with time it becomes clear that she is...

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.

From the celebrated author of The Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor, a splendid novel about starting over late in life 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. Candida is not exactly destitute. So is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is...

"A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist. Francesca Stubbs has a very 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 she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son,...

A fascinating, humorous, and timeless coming-of-age tale featuring one of Jane Austen's most memorable characters.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition…had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

The celebrated opening of Jane Austen’s Emma introduces readers to a supremely self-assured...