Dame Margaret Drabble CBE

Anna is a child of special, unknowable qualities. She is a happy child, always willing to smile at the world around her. But she also presents profound challenges. For her mother Jess, still in her early twenties, living alone in North London and hoping to embark on an adventurous career, her arrival will prove life-transforming.

Over the course of decades, in ways large and small, Anna will affect the lives and loves of those around her. While Anna herself will remain largely unaltered by the passing years, she will live through a period of dramatic change, her journey illuminating our shifting attitudes towards motherhood, responsibility and the way we care for one another.

Both personal and political, The Pure Gold Baby is a remarkable portrait of a family, a friendship, and a neighbourhood.It is a novel of great beauty, wisdom and stealthy power by one of our country's foremost and acclaimed writers.

This collection shows Margaret Drabble to be a leading practitioner of the art of the short story, presenting her complete short fiction for the first time in a single volume, spanning four decades, from 1964 to 2000. Several of the stories, like The Dower House at Kellynch, are set in Somerset and Dorset and reflect their author's intimate knowledge of the land and flora there, but their settings also range as far as Elba and Cappadocia. Taken as a whole, the stories reflect the social changes of the past forty years, by showing the English at home and abroad. In 'The Gifts of War', peace-protesting students clash with a mother buying a toy for her son, with tragic consequences. An Englishman on honeymoon has a brief but significant epiphany, finding a shared humanity with a Moroccan crowd in 'Hassan's Tower'. Their protagonists are men and women, husbands and lovers, television presenters and housewives, all subtly and precisely captured as products of their time and place. In his introduction, Spanish scholar José Francisco Fernández celebrates the 'pure and simple pleasure to be found in reading these survivalist, questioning, belligerently intense short stories'.

Humphrey and Ailsa meet as children by a grey, northern sea. Humphrey is quiet, serious and will in time explore the sea's mysteries; Ailsa is angry, a freckled cobra ready to strike. Yet they fascinate one another and when they meet again years later they fall briefly and disastrously in love. Half a lifetime passes before Humphrey and Ailsa's paths finally re-cross. What will each make of their past? And of the future? THE SEA LADY tells the story of first and last love, of evolution and the ebb and flow of time that gives shape to our lives.

Two hundred years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen's ghost decides to set the record straight about her extraordinary existence and Dr Babs Halliwell, with her own complicated past, is the perfect envoy. Why does the Red Queen pick Babs to keep her story alive, and what else does she want from her? Set in 18th century Korea and the present day, THE RED QUEEN is a rich and atmospheric novel about love, and what it means to be remembered.

When Candida Wilton arrives alone in London, divorced and rejected and without much money, she is filled with a strange sense of excitement. What can happen, at her age, to change her fortunes? How will she adjust to this shabby, violent, yet curiously attractive city? When Candida starts writing her diary, she expects that she will fill it with the small events with which she pads out her empty life, but she has always had a secret belief that despite all she is a lucky person. And she is, in a sense, right, for when an unexpected windfall brings her sudden riches, her horizons broaden: she will start, she thinks, with a trip abroad...

It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. At the other end of the century her granddaughter, Faro, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the town where her grandmother grew up and sees the families who have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. But for all her exotic ancestry and glamour, has she really travelled any further than them?

Freda Haxby is as famous for her writing as she is for her eccentricities. But for Daniel Palmer, Rosemary, Grace and their families, she is a monster mother. This is the story of an end-of-the-century family whose comfortable lives are disrupted by a succession of sinister events.

Two years ago novelist Stephen Cox vanished to the east. There had been postcards, then silence: now Liz has received this strange parcel of jottings, bills, pictures and human bones. Enlisting the help of another of his friends, beautiful, unrestrained Hattie Osbourne, Liz begins to decipher the parcel by retracing Stephen's journey from the safety of England to the chaos and corruption of Southeast Asia...

Liz, Alix and Esther are old friends whose lives continue to cross and uncross. As the years pass, they are more than ever disposed to question, to re-evaluate, to examine their motives and directions in the brutally prosperous, atrocity-hungry society of Britain.

A deeply personal book on the jigsaw puzzle and the part it plays in the puzzle of its distinguished author's life. It is a mix of memoir, jigsaw history and the strange delights of puzzling. James Boswell described the 'innocent soothing relief from melancholy' of playing draughts, and Margaret Drabble - among countless others - has found a similar solace from assembling jigsaws. In THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET, she describes the history of this uniquely British form of meditation, from its earliest incarnation as a dissected map, used as a teaching tool in the late eighteenth century, to the other cut-outs and mosaics that have amused children and adults from Roman times until today. The resulting book is an original and moving personal history about ageing and the authenticity of memory; about the importance of childhood play; and, how we rearrange objects into new patterns to make sense of our past and ornament our present.

Based on the text of Margaret Drabble's 1995 edition, this sixth edition has been completely reworked and expanded. There are nearly 600 entirely new entries to reflect the new figures and issues of English Literature in the new millennium, and the existing entries have been extensively revised and updated to incorporate the latest scholarship. But this new edition remains faithful to Sir Paul Harvey's original vision of an authoritative work placing English literature from the Classical world, Europe, Latin America, and beyond. In addition to the extensive coverage of writers, works, literary theory, allusions, and characters, there are sixteen featured essay-style entries on key topics including black British literature, fantasy fiction, and modernism.

This biography of Sir Angus Wilson traces his early years as a librarian at the British Library, interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park, before his rise as novelist, critic, lecturer and man of letters following the publication of his first volume of stories, "The Wrong Set", in 1949. It also describes the range of contacts he made and maintained around the fixed point of his relationship with his friend and companion of forty years, Tony Garrett, and his role as an influence and mentor for a younger generation of writers.