The Pure Gold Baby

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of seventeen highly acclaimed novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen and most recently The Sea Lady. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2000 Honours list. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

* Extraordinary and intriguing -- SADIE JONES author of The Outcast * The Pure Gold Baby is an unexpected gift from a great author. How do we treat the child who walks among us in a different way than most? In Margaret Drabble's hands the answer is with a depth of empathy few master. Fortunately for us, Drabble has spent a lifetime doing just that in exquisitely written prose -- ALICE SEBOLD author of The Lovely Bones * Drabble writes so penetratingly about the female condition that it is impossible not to laugh, wince and admire -- Amanda Craig New Statesman * One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around Financial Times * The novels brim with sharply observed life and the author's seemingly infinite sympathy for "ordinary women" -- Joyce Carol Oates The New Yorker * Drabble excels at describing the minute detail of human behaviour Independent * Drabble's generous and unsentimental truthfulness to the condition of childhood is very rare Guardian * Drabble expertly charts the way our childhood experiences inform and shape us throughout our lives Spectator on The Sea Lady * Marvellous, utterly engrossing Guardian on The Sea Lady * Her short stories glimmer with the irony, lyricism, moral vision and amplitude we associate with Drabble's novels New York Times on A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman * An unusual, engaging and yet tantalising memoir The Times on The Pattern in the Carpet * Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye is an extraordinary work: It not only tells a story deftly, beautifully, with a management of past and present (and future) action that demonstrates Miss Drabble's total mastery of the mysterious form of the novel, but it succeeds in so re-creating the experiences of her characters that we soon forget they are fictional beings... and we become them, we are transformed into them, so that by the end of the novel we have lived, through them, a very real, human and yet extraordinary experience -- Joyce Carol Oates New