Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive
as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history.
Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey Northern sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was already a serious child, drawn towards the underwater world of marine biology, but there were as yet few signs of Ailsa's dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity.
The novel traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future.
In this taut and elegiac novel, Margaret Drabble examines the ways in which place, chance and time merge to make us what we are.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She was awarded a CBE in 1980. Her many novels include the trilogy The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989)
and The Gates of Ivory (1991), along with The Peppered Moth (2000) and The Seven Sisters (2002)
and The Red Queen (2004>, all of which are published by Penguin. Among her non-fiction works are Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1974), The Oxford
Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000, edited) and Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995).
Margaret Drabble is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London.
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