Books by Margaret Drabble
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 girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a flood plain in the West Country. Fran cannot help but think of her mortality, but she is "not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee." She still prizes her "frisson of autonomy," her belief in herself as a dynamic individual doing meaningful work in the world. The Dark Flood Rises moves between Fran's interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. In both places, disaster looms. In Britain, the flood tides are rising, and in the Canaries, there is always the potential for a seismic event. As well, migrants are fleeing an increasingly war-torn Middle East. Though The Dark Flood Rises delivers the pleasures of a traditional novel, it is clearly situated in the precarious present. Margaret Drabble's latest enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Alas, there is undeniable truth in Fran's insight: "Old age, it's a fucking disaster "
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.
"Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history." "Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey northern sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was already a serious child, drawn towards the underwater world of marine biology, but there were as yet few signs of Ailsa's dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity. The novel traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future." "In this elegiac novel, Margaret Drabble examines the ways in which place, chance and time merge to make us what we are."--BOOK JACKET
