A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

The ever-opinionated Alix Bowen and charming Liz Headleand have been friends since Cambridge; now middle-aged, their lives have settled into a steady rhythm that is suddenly shaken when both women seek to reclaim the curiosity and call to adventure that galvanized them in their university days.

  • Format: eBook
  • ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544286399
  • ISBN-10: 0544286391
  • Pages: 320
  • Publication Date: 10/01/2013
  • Carton Quantity: 1
About the Book
About the Author
Reviews
  • About the Book

    Alix Bowen and Liz Headleand have been friends since Cambridge. Now middle-aged, Alix and her husband Brian have settled in a small town in the moors of northern England. Politically liberal and attracted to the unknown, Alix has developed a friendship with a convicted murderer, having promised to help him find his long-lost mother. Liz, a successful psychiatrist and socially well-connected, has an insatiable desire to understand the psyches of strangers, while putting her own on hold. But when her sister, Shirley, makes a drastic life change, Liz is forced to turn her ever-observant eye inward, discovering things about herself she had buried deep within. In this stunning return to the beloved friends of The Radiant Way, Margaret Drabble once more shows us a world rich and wonderfully nuanced, with her singular wit and keen insight.

  • About the Author

    Margaret Drabble

    MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

  • Excerpts
  • Reviews
    Praise for Margaret Drabble:

    "Reading a Margaret Drabble novel has always been like cozying up with a cup of hot tea by a gas fire with a dull English winter rain misting the window, and contemplating the story of one's own life."
    —The New York Times

    "As meticulous as Jane Austen, and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh."
    —Los Angeles Times

    "The deft commingling of the sentimental and the matter-of-fact is characteristic of writer Margaret Drabble…Drabble is one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation."
    —Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker

    "Reading Margaret Drabble's novels has become something of a rite of passage…Sharply observed, exquisitely companionable tales of women of a certain age and class, educated, egocentric, strong, unlucky in love."
    —Washington Post

    "    Drabble's fiction has achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life."
    —Chicago Tribune

    "What distinguishes Drabble's fiction from the commonplace is that, like Doris Lessing's early work, it nails femaleness. Drabble's women bleed, some metaphorically, but not all."
    —San Francisco Chronicle

    "A superb novelist."
    —The Dallas Morning News
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