Margaret Drabble

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...

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...

Margaret Drabble's novels have illuminated the past fifty years, especially the changing lives of women, like no others. Yet her short fiction has its own unique brilliance. Her penetrating evocations of character and place, her wide-ranging curiosity, her sense of irony-all are on display here, in stories that explore marriage, female friendships, the English tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics, cultural...

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...

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...

Liz Headleand is one of London's best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she arrives at work to find a mysterious package, postmarked from Cambodia. Inside, she finds various scraps of paper, a laundry bill from a Bangkok hotel, old newspaper clippings-and pieces of human finger bones. Shocked but intrigued, she realizes the papers belong to her old friend Stephen Cox, a playwright who moved to Cambodia to work on a script about the...

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...

Just thirty-eight-years-old, Anthony Keating's already survived both a divorce and a heart attack. He has left the BBC for the dangerous life of property speculation in the boom-and-bust 1970s, and is brooding on the oil crisis, galloping inflation and the slump in his grand house in the British countryside. His only stroke of good luck in an otherwise collapsing life is his new lover, the beautiful actress Alison Murray. But when Alison's daughter...

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,...