Margaret Drabble

Now available in eBook. While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone. When Liz Headleand receives a mysterious package full of papers – and a bone – she calmly recognises the handwriting of her old friend, the delicate, reticent, honourable novelist Stephen Cox who had vanished some years earlier. Sifting through the gaps and inconsistencies of memory, she begins to piece together a trail that took...

First published in 1965, The Millstone tells the story of Rosamund Stacey, who gets pregnant after a one night stand when she loses her virginity. An academic, Rosamund socialises in liberal, literary circles but has been secretly reserved about sex as well as feeling social guilt. When she discovers she is pregnant, she decides to keep the baby despite society's expectation for her to have an abortion as a single mother carrying an illegitimate child. Giving birth to a daughter, she is...

Now available in eBook. January 1987. Alix Bowen has moved away from London and her old friends Liz and Esther to South Yorkshire. Regularly visiting a serial killer in a high-security prison, her natural curiosity in his motives and character transforms into obsession as she begins to look to the murderer for answers about human nature and herself. Meanwhile, now in their fifties, Liz, Esther and their friends come to question the society they live in more than ever as they navigate life...

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017: ‘masterly’ GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: 'An absolute tour de force' Fran may be old but she's not going without a fight. So she dyes her hair, enjoys every glass of red wine, drives around the country for her job with a housing charity and lives in an insalubrious tower block that her loved ones disapprove of. And as each of them – her pampered ex Claude, old friend Jo, flamboyant son Christopher and earnest daughter Poppet – seeks...

Now available in eBook. 1979. Three old Cambridge friends are brought together at a party to celebrate New Year's Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment. A moment to reflect on what had seemed to be – and a moment to prophesy. 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 with the personal and...

The Pure Gold Baby is the story of Anna, a little girl with a luminescent quality, her mother, Jess, and the community that envelops them. A happy child, Anna is the unchanging core of this journey spanning decades and continents through the lives of those that love her. This profoundly engaging portrait of family, friendship, and the way we care for each other is a powerful reminder, if one were needed, of Margaret Drabble's literary greatness.

In The Pattern in the Carpet the award-winning and beloved writer Margaret Drabble explores her own family story alongside the history of her favourite childhood pastime – the jigsaw. The result is an original and moving personal history about remembrance, growing older, the importance of play and the ways in which we make sense of our past by ornamenting our present.

Now available in eBook. 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 and precocious intelligence, she longs for the day she will eventually escape the working class life her...