One scarcely recognizes Drabble's (The Witch of Exmoor, etc.) customary satirical verve in this thinly veiled fictional account of her mother's life. According to the author's afterword, it was painful to write; moreover, it's...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author . Harcourt $24 (332p) ISBN 978-0-15-101106-3
In her 16th novel, Drabble exhibits her characteristic ironic detachment in an elegantly constructed meditation on memory, mortality, risk and reward. Dr. Babs Halliwell, a 40-ish academic on sabbatical at Oxford, receives an anonymous gift on the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author . Harcourt $24 (345p) ISBN 978-0-15-101263-3
The bold latest from by the ever-inventive Drabble (The Red Queen
, etc.) tells the tale of two aging academics—Ailsa Kelman, flamboyant feminist activist and TV talking head, and marine biologist Humphrey Clark—who are traveling...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $25 (353p) ISBN 978-0-547-24144-9
Part memoir, part rigorously researched historical perspective, Drabble's book is a multi-layered look at jigsaw puzzles and their role through the ages for society, individuals, and herself; it's also a charming homage to Drabble's...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $23 (288p) ISBN 978-0-15-100363-1
Frieda Haxby Palmer, writer, intellectual, and the witch of the title of this bristling social satire, is a splendid, classic British eccentric, a woman who is capable of serving her family a dish of proletarian ""Bumperburgers,"" which contains no...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Alfred A. Knopf $18.95 (407p) ISBN 978-0-394-56143-1
One cannot read Drabble (The Ice Age) without being aware of the culture in which she writes; her novels are as much social and political commentary as they are acute character studies. This latest work gives us another grim picture of Britain in...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Viking Books $22 (480p) ISBN 978-0-670-84270-4
``Why impose the story line of individual fate upon a story which is at least in part to do with numbers?'' asks Drabble in the middle of her follow-up to The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity. Instead of developing a conventional plot, the author
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Viking Books $19.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-82837-1
Continuing her ironic depiction of ``mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired . . . post-imperial, post-industrial'' Britain, and again taking up the lives of Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and (only tangentially) Esther Breuer--met in The Radiant Way --Drabble...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Penguin Books $10 (320p) ISBN 978-0-14-012228-2
Continuing her ironic depiction of ``mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired . . . post-imperial, post-industrial'' Britain, and taking up the lives of characters met in The Radiant Way , Drabble here produces a tighter and more cohesive tale . ``While her
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author Penguin Books $12 (480p) ISBN 978-0-14-016719-1
Instead of developing a conventional plot, Drabble's brilliant follow-up to The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity casts a tone of sympathetic irony over the daily affairs of her heroines. (May)
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author St. Martin's Press $35 (0p) ISBN 978-0-312-14276-6
Drabble's biography (her only previous one was Arnold Bennett) has the dubious virtue of being the longest life of the late novelist (1913-1991) that readers are ever likely to encounter. Almost as many names are dropped in these pages as populate...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (208p) ISBN 978-0-547-55040-4
This collection from one of the United Kingdom's finest contemporary fiction writers reflects both the development of dame Drabble's work as well as the decades in which societal expectations for women–and women's expectations of themselves–were...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble, Author, Drabble, Author . Harcourt $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-15-100740-0
The narrator of Drabble's teasingly clever new novel, like several of her fictional predecessors (in The Witch of Endor
and The Peppered Moth) is a lonely, middle-aged woman disillusioned with her life and wary about her future. Betrayed and...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-544-15890-0
Anna, the eponymous golden baby, is born to anthropologist Jess Speight in 1960s London. Anna is sweet-natured, pretty, and, it turns out, developmentally disabled: she’ll never live on her own or learn to read. And though she’s fatherless, her...
READ FULL REVIEW
Margaret Drabble. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-13495-2
This searingly sad but often hilarious novel chronicles the last dance of a few old codgers, and Drabble (The Sea Lady) has filled her tale with characters desperately trying to make sense of life and loss, of beauty, talent, missed opportunities,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Tim Barringer, Edith Devaney, Margaret Drabble, et al.. Abrams, $95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4197-0280-8
A survey of landscapes by prolific painter David Hockney, this catalogue for an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London emphasizes more recent work by the artist, in which his focus returns to the countryside surrounding his native Yorkshire,...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
