Sophie Mackintosh

Margaret Drabble

Esther Freud

Combining personal reminiscence with reflections on the history of the place over the years and through the seasons, for the first time this collection brings together writers' impressions of the Pond.

Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies' Pond

At the Pond

An independent young woman is faced with a difficult choice when she discovers that she is pregnant after her one and only sexual experience

The Millstone

Liz, Alix and Esther were among the most brilliant of their generation. To these three gifted and ambitious young women, fresh from Cambridge in the 1950s, the world offered its riches ...On New Year's Eve 1979 they reunite. What does the future now hold for Liz, assured Harley Street psychotherapist, wife, mother and stepmother; for relentlessly well-intentioned Alix, teaching English literature to young girl offenders; and for Esther, eccentric connoisseur of art and resolutely single. Margaret Drabble's magnificent novel explores the lives of these three women, and in telling of their loves and losses, their hopes and fears, she creates an unforgettable panorama of our changing times. 'A sublime example of Miss Drabble's mastery in unravelling the intricacies of intimate relationships' - The Times'The Radiant Way shows a Dickensian desire to encompass the whole of contemporary British life, with its widening social and regional gulfs ... Humane, intelligent

A Novel

The Radiant Way

Two hundred years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen doesn’t want her extraordinary existence to be forgotten. Her long and privileged life behind the Korean palace walls was not all it seemed, and the Red Queen (or her ghost) is still desperate to retell her tale. Dr. Barbara Halliwell, with her own complicated past, seems the perfect envoy – having read the memoirs of the Crown Princess on the plane to Seoul, Barbara has become utterly engrossed in her story. But why has the Red Queen selected Barbara to keep her story alive, and what else does she want from her? As she explores the inner sanctums and the royal courts, Barbara Halliwell begins to feel a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. After a brief, intense, and ill-fated love affair, she returns to London. Is she ensnared by the events of the past week, of the past two hundred years, or will she pick up her life where she left it? Set in eighteenth-century Korea and the present day, The Red Queen is a rich, playful, and atmospheric novel about love, about personal and public history, and what it means to be remembered. Beautifully told, ingeniously constructed, this novel reveals Margaret Drabble at her extraordinary best. From the Hardcover edition.

The Red Queen

Her promising career in 1960s London interrupted by an affair with a married professor that renders her a single mother, anthropology student Jessica Speight faces wrenching questions about responsibility, potential and compassion when her sunny child reveals unique needs. By the renowned author of The Sea Lady. 30,000 first printing.

The Pure Gold Baby

A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives “restlessly round England,” which is “her last love . . . She wants to see it all before she dies.” Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country. The space between vitality and morality suddenly seems narrow, but Fran “is not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee.” She still prizes her “frisson of autonomy,” her belief in herself as a dynamic individual doing meaningful work in the world. This dark and glittering novel moves back and forth between an interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. It is set against a backdrop of rising flood tides in Britain and the seismic fragility of the Canaries, where we also observe the flow of immigrants from an increasingly war-torn Middle East. With Margaret Drabble’s characteristic wit and deceptively simple prose, The Dark Flood Rises enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Of course, there is undeniable truth in Francesca’s insight: “Old age, it’s a fucking disaster!”

The Dark Flood Rises

Divorced and estranged from her grown daughters, Candida Wilton moves to a run-down flat well below her means and finds exhilaration in her self-imposed poverty, during which she confides her thoughts to a computer and makes friends with new peers. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

The Seven Sisters

As Faro Gaulden listens to a lecture on genetic inheritance, she wonders why some people live in one place generation after generation whereas others feel the need for continuous movement, and finds that the past has a way of reasserting itself . Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

The Peppered Moth

˜Theœ Waterfall

Emily Brontë

The story of the passionate love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is accompanied by a selection of Bronte's poetry

Wuthering Heights and Poems

A single-volume compilation of the 2008 Dame of the British Empire's previously uncollected short works offers insight into her use of irony, female friendships and personal passions and is complemented by an introduction that places her works in a context of her life and novels. By the author of The Sea Lady. 25,000 first printing.

Complete Short Stories

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

Mark Haddon

Ramsey Campbell

Lara Williams

David Constantine

Alan Beard

Gaia Holmes

Bernardine Bishop

Lucie McKnight-Hardy

Matthew Holness

Something has fallen away. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma's award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject - Julia Kristeva's theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille's societal equivalent - with visceral stories of modern unease.

Tales of Modern Unease

The New Abject

Traveling separately to Ornemouth, England, a town by the North Sea where they had spent a summer together as children, Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman reassess the course of their individual lives and decisions over the past thirty years of separation, reviewing the successes and failures of their public lives, as well as their secret history, in the process.

A Late Romance

The Sea Lady

Jane and Malcolm Gray’s marriage is characterized by sexual unhappiness and the growing apathy they both feel toward one another. When Jane is confined to bed rest while pregnant with their second child, Malcolm realizes he must escape, leaving Jane in the care of her dear friend and cousin, Lucy, and Lucy’s husband James. After Jane gives birth, Lucy and James alternate nights with her, and it is during this time alone together that Jane and James fall in love, beginning an affair as marked by guilt as joy. Through Jane’s struggle to reconcile her relationship with James with her friendship with Lucy, Margaret Drabble gives us an intimate look at a woman caught between the claims of sexual awakening, maternal love and friendship.

The Waterfall

Liz Headleand receives a package from an old friend containing writing, drawings, and what appear to be finger bones, and soon she is on an adventure, determined to discover what her friend is trying to tell her. Reprint.

The Gates of Ivory

English archaeologist Frances Wingate, divorced mother of four, and distinguished scholar Karel Schmidt, selfless and marriage-imprisoned, stay-at-home, come inexorably together once more after years of on-again, off-again romance

The Realms of Gold

Meeting Rose, a woman whose notorious reputation caused her to appear in the news regularly, Simon Camish learns about her separation from her Greek husband, wonders at her refusal to leave her slum neighborhood, and admires her courage when her husband attempts to gain custody of their children. By the author of The Peppered Moth. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Needle's Eye

"Je m'intéresse beaucoup à l'idée de l'innocence, l'idée qu'une personne soit incapable de faire le mal, car pour la plupart nous sommes assaillis de pensées malveillantes. Anna, le "bébé d'or pur" du roman. est innocente, détachée de tout héritage. Instinctivement, elle cherche à faire le bien, à contenter les autres." Margaret Drabble. "Un bébé d'or pur est le cadeau inattendu d'un grand auteur. Comment traiter un enfant qui évolue parmi nous d'une manière différente des autres ? La réponse surgit sous la plume de Margaret Drabble avec une profondeur et une empathie que peu d'écrivains maîtrisent." Alice Sebold. "L'un des écrivains les plus provocateurs intellectuellement et qui donnent le plus à réfléchir." Financial Times.

Daniel Comnenus

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