Margaret Drabble

When Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relations at Mansfield Park she seems shy and withdrawn beside her witty and vivacious cousins. But Fanny's steadfast and purposeful character makes her an indispensable part of the household. As the others become entangled in a maze of flirtation and intrigue, it is only Fanny whose deep but secret love for Edmund Bertram remains true despite his fascination with her brilliant but frivolous cousin...

Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of new love provide the theme for Jane Austen’s dramatically human narrative.
“I wish as well as everybody else to be perfectly happy but like everybody else it must be in my own way.”
Elinor, practical and conventional, is the perfection of sense. Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the embodiment of sensibility. To each comes the sorrow of unhappy...

This unique blend of memoir and history takes “a multi-layered look at jigsaw puzzles . . . charming [and] fascinating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Award-winning author Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries—for...

An eccentric English grandmother as seen by her children. One of the more disturbing aspects of Frieda Palmer, a wealthy freethinker and political crusader, is that she has sold the family house to live as a hermit. The children are worried she might blow the rest of the inheritance.

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.

"A ... mordant reckoning with mortality... Francesca Stubbs has a very 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 she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden...