When Candida Wilton arrives alone in London, divorced and rejected and without much money, she is filled with a strange sense of excitement. What can happen, at her age, to change her fortunes? How will she adjust to this shabby, violent, yet curiously attractive city? When Candida starts writing her diary, she expects that she will fill it with the small events with which she pads out her empty life, but she has always had a secret belief that despite all she is a lucky person. And she is right, in a sense, for when an unexpected windfall brings her sudden riches, her horizons broaden.
Gathering together six travelling companions - women friends from childhood, from married life and after - Candida maps out the journey she has long dreamed of: to Tunis, Naples and Pompeii. Finally, she has realized that one can make anything happen, if one has the nerve...
The Seven Sisters is an extraordinary portrait of London today; of the solitary life and loneliness; of friendship and the sudden transformations fate can bring.
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), and The Peppered Moth (2000), all of which were published
by Viking and 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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