The Realms of Gold is a sophisticated, realistically suspenseful love story about two highly intelligent, successful, complicated people who love, who separate, and who need to return to each other. And it is a novel, as well, about family connection and human heritage in the last twentieth century - how, in the midst of the endless splitting and drifting apart, people yearn to regain their links with family, past and present, and the strengthening revelations of self those links can yield.

Frances Wingate is a famous archeologist. Divorced, the mother of four, she is a career woman possessed of a splendid carelessness - able to manage conferences in Rome and Africa, "digs" in far corners of the world, breakthrough papers in her field. Reeling from country to country, organizing meals and schools and comfort for the kids, buying socks for one in Alexandria, rushing home from Glasgow to take another to the doctor, wearing clothes until they fall to pieces, she is unruffled by it all - full of passion, amusement, and appeal, still madly in love with the married man she has been seeing on and off (now off) for years. Madly in love - but wistful and hopeful, not desperate.

A little restless, a little on edge, she is still a holder of aces, unembarrassed - even pleased - with her talent, her success, her undeniable singularity.

Karel Schmidt is the man she loves. A distinguished refugee scholar, a man of weird and crazy principles, married to a self-destructive, self-involved woman, he expends himself night after night with people who need him, drinking with them, lending them money, driving them to trains, fixing them up with psychiatrists, degree courses, drug contacts. He is opaque with goodness like thick old glass, charged with a strange sense of life - oddly shambled but somehow magnetic, indestructible.

France's ancestry is all morbidity and coziness, split between suicides and Novel Prize-winners, rich eccentrics and poor farming people from the flat English Midlands. Karel is cut off from family, having barely escaped the gas chambers, sent ahead by his mother when no one else escaped in time….

The movement of these two, once again, toward each other provides the main thrust of a novel filled with people, with feeling, with intelligence. Strong and serious, alive with a buoyant, generous, quirky sense of life that embraces the pranks and twists of fortune, The Realms of Gold further advances Margaret Drabble's standing among the novelists of first importance writing today.

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