Margaret Drabble

'There aren't many chroniclers of our older years who do it so well, with such wit and realism and intelligence' TESSA HADLEY'I have learned so much from Margaret Drabble's work' SALLY ROONEY'Wise, elegiac' The Times'One of Britain's most dazzling writers' New York Times'Generous, perceptive and good-humoured' JOAN BAKEWELL'One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around' Financial TimesWe all age differently, some stoically, some angrily, some calmly, some with an unfailing spirit of adventure and an undimmed curiosityFrom one of our finest literary voices, The Great Good Places is a luminous collection of essays, stories and memoir that traverses the experience of growing older and looking back on a life deeply lived. Drawing on decades of reading, writing and observation, Margaret Drabble reflects on the complex business of ageing, the strange workings of memory - its wonders and its fragility - and on the 'great good places', the childhood homes, coastal sanctuaries and cherished libraries that shape who we are. Rich with a lifetime's worth of insight and wisdom and peppered with Drabble's trademark lucidity and wit, The Great Good Places is an elegantly layered and profoundly moving meditation on time, place and the enduring power of recollection.

Choked by domesticity and overshadowed by her husband's acting career, Emma is finding that life has reduced her to a supporting role. And when her husband lands his big break at a new theatre company, her want for something more boils over. Quietly radical and fiercely intelligent, The Garrick Year is a sharp and merciless dark comedy about marriage, motherhood and the pull of ambition, told through the eyes of a complicated and fascinating woman at the very end of her tether.

Frieda Palmer - an eccentric, brilliant and infuriating woman with a maddening disregard for convention - has withdrawn to a decaying house by the sea on the wild edges of Exmoor. Now, the question of which of her children will inherit her fortune looms large. But do any of them really deserve i? et against the turbulent backdrop of post-Thatcherite Britain, The Witch of Exmoor is a spellbinding portrait of a troubled family and a wry dissection of middle-class sentiment around legacy and social ambition.

What do we owe to the past? What do we owe ourselve? rances Wingate has it all, not least a flourishing career as an archaeologist and a razor-sharp mind. But when an old affair resurfaces - after years of on-again, off-again romance - she finds herself questioning everything she ever wanted out of life. In The Realms of Gold, Drabble crafts a luminous story of love, purpose and regret, and captures the essence of what it means to be a woman at a crossroads.

A highly acclaimed exploration of the way in which the landscape has both influenced and been represented in British Romantic literature. Margaret Drabble on the Romantics presents an image of Britain as seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated authors. Many of the Romantics, as well as their successors, are closely associated with particular landscapes – the Wordsworths with the Lake District, Walter Scott with the Scottish Borders, the Brontë sisters with West Yorkshire. Margaret Drabble deepens our understanding of this connection, unpacking the Romantics' fascination with all varieties of rural landscape, from roaring seas to tranquil villages, while also exploring their writing's subtler associations. Herself a star in the literary firmament, Drabble illuminates how this love of place fashioned some of the Romantics' greatest works. She considers the resonances of myth and legend, art and earlier literature that the Romantics found in places such as North Wales and Cornwall and investigates how their writing has, in turn, shaped our visual attitudes, taste in landscape and relation to nature.