A midsummer's evening in Hampshire, deep in the country,
and the Palmer family - Daniel, Gogo, Rosemary, their partners
and their children - are coming to the end of an enjoyable meal.
From this pleasant vantage point by the Aga they play a dinner-party game:
what kind of society would you be willing to accept if you didn't in advance know
your place in it? But the abstract question of justice, like all their family
conversations, is brought back to the more pressing problem of their famous
and eccentric mother, Frieda, who has abandoned them and her old life and
gone off to live alone on Exmoor.
Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure, a monster mother with a mysterious
past. What is she plotting against them now? Has some inconvenient form of
political correctness led her (unjustly of course) to favour her enchanting
half-Guyanese grandson? What will she do with her money? Is she really
writing her memoirs? And why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor
finally driven her mad?
Margaret Drabble's new novel, her first for five years, brilliantly interweaves
high comedy and personal tragedy with questions about social justice and
progress, as she unravels the story of this end-of-the-century family whose
comfortable, rational lives - both public and private - are violently disrupted
by a succession of sinister, messy events.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and went to the Mount School, York,
a Quaker boarding school. She won a Major Scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge,
where she read English. She was awarded a CBE in 1980.
Her many novels include the trilogy The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity
and The Gates of Ivory, all of which were published by Viking and Penquin.
Among her non-fiction works are Arnold Bennett: A Biography, The Oxford
Companion to English Literature (editor) and, most recently, Angus
Wilson: A Biography.
Margaret Drabble is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London.
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