In The Gates of Ivory, one of our most acclaimed, most ferociously
perceptive writer now widens her creative canvas to bring forth her most powerful,
passionate novel, yet. Liz Headland, a London psychiatrist blessed with a successful
practice, and amicable divorce, and independent children - all the comforts of the
modern world - receives a cryptic package in the mail. Inside are drawings of
Cambodian temple ruins, fragments of a novel by her old friend Stephen Cox, and
two points from a human finger bone.
The package is a message, apparently from Stephen, which Liz can decipher only
by retracing its sender's journey form the safety of England to the chaos and
corruption of Southeast Asia. As Margaret Drabble interweaves the odysseys of
Liz and Stephen, she ushers the reader into a world that would be colorful were
it's horrors not so authentically portrayed - a world of entrepreneurial beauty
queens and media superstars, of ideological butchers and permanent refugees.
Here is perhaps the most memorable of Margaret Drabble's novels - a brilliant
successor to The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity and one that
ranks with her classic, The Ice Age and The Realms of Gold.
It is scalding in its indignation and riveting in its narrative drive.
In The Gates of Ivory she recreates nothing less than the end of our century.
With all its huge betrayals and small apocalypses intact.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, in 1939 and was educated at Cambridge University.
She published her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, in 1963, and is the author of twelve
novels in all, most recently The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity.
She is also the author of a number of works of biography and criticism, and is the editor
of The Oxford Companion to English Literature
She has three children and lives in London with her husband, the biographer Michael Holroyd.
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