She has had a spectacular career as a writer for women's magazines; she began writing "new wave" women's pieces before there was a term for them, sharing her pregnancies, exhaustions, indignations, and adventures with a shocked and enthralled public which is now devoted to her. She ahs wonderful friends - theater people who are exotic and nutty and kind, academics, scientists - intelligent, fulfilled, devoted men and women. She was married to a would-be painter, compulsively impractical, with a remarkable capacity for ruining his own chances. She had a long affair with the husband of a friend, but it didn't damage any of those involved, and it's over. She has run through the expected phases of life - intensely, passionately, in the most worthy way - but what now?

In this novel - so strong and alive, so wonderfully substantial - we see how this woman, with her charm and talent and energy, surrounded by a constant flux of family and friends ("Let her be happy," one of them prays, "let her recover, let her be a freak escape from the general doom …"), experiences this shaky plateau, her gifts and accomplishments in full flower, yet she herself poised for a t ransformation of resolve, direction, belief, something. We see her with her children, with her ex-husband, with her lovers, at work (has achievement become too much of a habit?), half involved in new ways in all the life around her, half giddy with a sense of sudden solitude and strength. We watch as she seems to lose, and then regain, her inner composure, and renew her determination - so mysteriously at risk - to open herself to the unseen future that is waiting for her to meet it.

Margaret Drabble lives in London with her three children. She is the author of eight other novels and of a biography of Arnold Bennett.