At the center: a woman at midlife, an energetic, interesting woman, a pretty ex-actress anxiously caring for her family while experimenting inside a new, generous, romantic relationship … and her lover, a handsome man, a man of tact and feeling, dissatisfied with his past, leaving his respectable BBC job and entering the excitements and corruptions of high (chancy) finance. And around them - others who represent facets of their future: an irresistible real estate tycoon enmeshed in a tricky, ambitious enterprise that has catastrophically backfired; an adorable young rogue of a girl poised between the joys of being kept by an adventurer and a longing for respectable marriage; a troubled teenager testing her mother's love while involved in a terrifying imbroglio behind the Iron Curtain …

The Ice Age has all the absorbing richness and assured novelistic quality we have come to expect from Margaret Drabble's work. These people are alive, convincing, intelligent, all of them enlisting our sympathies, holding us in suspense as we watch their stratagems for keeping themselves going, for enlarging their lives and deepening life's meaning - their clever or foolish ventures into business; their complicated bids for love, security, satisfying self-expression, romance; their spirited assumption of responsibility for their children, adrift in the craziness of the sixties and seventies. …

And as we follow them ardently opening out, weathering the tensions, exploring (and braving) the challenges that evolve in their lives, we receive a wonderfully moving vision of the hard-pressed England of today: a country threatened and subdued but not in collapse, an England possibly on the verge of a new and more demanding state of grace.

Margaret Drabble lives in London. She is the author of seven other novels, the most recent being The Needle's Eye and The Realms of Gold, and of a biography of Arnold Bennett.