"What I do suffer from is curiosity," remarks the successful psychotherapist
Liz Headland to her friend the gossip columnist Ivan Warner. "I want to know what
really happened." This insatiable passion to know drives virtually all the characters
in Margaret Drabble's brilliant, engrossing, and wise new novel: there is Liz herself,
divorced from her TV producer husband, Charles, but united with him in an effort to find
out what has happened to their friend Dirk David, now a hostage in a Middle Eastern country.
There is Liz's sister Shirley Harper, who with Liz learns the truth about their mother's life
and death - but only after a made escapade reveals parts of herself she never new existed.
There is Alix Bowen, Liz's friend from university days, now living in a small city in
the north of England, where she visits regularly with an imprisoned murderer, bringing
him books about the ancient Britons and trying to track down his long-vanished mother - Alix,
who learns things she didn't want to know.
A Natural Curiosity, Margaret Drabble's eleventh novel,
continues the story of Alix, Liz, and their university comrade
Esther Breuer begun so brilliantly in The Radiant Way.
In Margaret Drabble's words, it "picks up some of the characters
and stories, while adding others; and it presents them against the
backdrop of a "post-imperial, post-industrial" 1980s England that bears
a striking resemblance to its American counterpart - a public landscape
in which our questions about how we live our lives, and what has happened
to us, take on a private intensity. The Dickensian sweep critics
praised in The Radiant Way is illuminated here by Margaret Drabble's
gifts for portraiture, her keen intelligence, and her wonderful sense of humor;
the reuslt is proof that Miss Drabble is one of the most extraordinary writers on either side of the Atlantic.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, in 1939 and was educated at Cambridge University.
She is the author of ten previous novels - her fist, A Summer Bird-Cage was published in 1963,
and her most recent, The Radiant Way, in 1987 - as well as a number of works of biography and
criticism, and she is the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She has three
children and is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.
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