An archaeologist struggles to unearth her own true passions in the “richest, most absorbing novel” by the author of The Dark Flood Rises (Joyce Carol Oates). Frances Wingate is one of England’s most renowned archaeologists, having recently discovered a lost city in the Saharan desert. On the outside, she appears to have it all. But beneath the surface, the scientist deals with the demands of children and family—as well as a tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance with a married historian. It’s only when Frances throws herself into her work that she discovers some surprising connections to others, in this novel about the search for meaning in life that is “alive with ideas” (Anatole Broyard, The New York Times).

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Margaret Drabble is a writer who plays a lively role in both popular and literary culture. Widely read and studied throughout the world her novels attract both the general reader and the literary critic. Originally published in 1985, Joanne Creighton examines this phenomenon and places particular emphasis on her "Englishness", her role as a woman writing credibly about modern women and her ability to mediate between the traditional and the modern. She argues that the resonances of Drabble’s work grow put of her strong sense of the powers and resources of existing literary traditions coupled with her intelligent portrayal of the familiar problems of people in modern society, and that is precisely this mediating position which makes Drabble an important voice in contemporary fiction and links her with other writers of her generation. Challenging those critics who see Drabble as a fiction traditionalist. Creighton finds her work open-ended, inquiring, equivocal and unquestionably contemporary in spirit.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

Margaret Drabble is a writer whose subject matter and technique have developed profoundly since the early sixties: this book draws together the different aspects of her narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events. The often distanced and ironic narration is discussed, and shown to reinforce Drabble's recurrent themes - themes that include the effect of early family influence and heredity on free choice, the inexorable pressure of social changes, and the role of accident in destabilizing the confident individual. In the later novels people move in a world where they and others may be victims of a callous society, but may equally be guilty of condoning or promoting society's worst trends. This study describes how narrative increasingly becomes ambiguous, offering then withholding support for the behaviour of the characters, and challenging the reader to think again.