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The Pure Gold Baby
Margaret Drabble
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Description for The Pure Gold Baby
Paperback. Margaret Drabble returns with a powerful novel of unbreakable love, enduring friendships and a society changing forever. Num Pages: 304 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 197 x 128 x 19. Weight in Grams: 208.
The Pure Gold Baby is the story of Anna, a little girl with a luminescent quality, her mother, Jess, and the community that envelops them. A happy child, Anna is the unchanging core of this journey spanning decades and continents through the lives of those that love her.
This profoundly engaging portrait of family, friendship, and the way we care for each other is a powerful reminder, if one were needed, of Margaret Drabble's literary greatness.
Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of many novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. ... Read moreShe was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd. Show Less
Reviews for The Pure Gold Baby
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 ... Read moreus, Drabble has spent a lifetime doing just that in exquisitely written prose
ALICE SEBOLD
author of The Lovely Bones
Moving and meditative
MEG WOLITZER
New Yorker
Superb ... a richly complex narrative voice achieves a choric magnificence hardly equalled in her earlier work
Stevie Davies
Independent
Involving and unexpectedly rich . . . a magnificent novel that confirms Drabble's status as a national treasure
Daily Mail
Subtle . . . The cadences of the prose, the kind of language used, the words that are chosen, echo the passing of the years . . . absorbing
Kirsty Gunn
Financial Times
Its prose has an almost folkloric quality . . . Characters, plotlines and themes swirl and proliferate
Alex Clark
Observer
Drabble's intelligence and compassion make it a hugely rewarding read
Mail on Sunday
A unique and profoundly stirring book
Elizabeth Day
Observer
Written with compassion and bathed in a poignant glow
Stylist
Her distinctive narrative voice and soaring prose remain electrifying
Spectator
Achingly wise
Wall Street Journal
One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around
Financial Times
The book succeeds as both a social critique and a sensitive view of the agonies and joys of raising disabled children . . . Insightful and wise, The Pure Gold Baby chronicles the deep challenges of parenting under any circumstances - yet it also captures the almost unbearable vulnerability of being human
Boston Globe
Her [Drabble's] prose is graceful and flowing . . . This is a quiet, contemplative novel . . . a moving testament to love, loyalty, and friendships between women . . . a poignant but ultimately uplifting tale
Independent
Drabble richly recreates that place and that environment [1960's North London] . . . Contained in the story, in fact, is a history of ideas about the mentally disturbed and the treatment of them. This is a tough assignment, and Drabble's brilliance appears here . . . while it reads very easily and seductively as a naturalistic novel, it slowly builds up a sense of wide horizons that one has never seen in quite the same way before
The Times
A jigsaw; its ambitious themes of parenthood, innocence, wounded children, anthropology, literature, madness, ageing, illness and love juxtaposed
Jane Shilling
Telegraph
The trick to reading the novel is to go with the flow as Drabble does, gliding into each event, laced with her dry, witty snaps of changing times of what was in the 1950s-'60s and what is now
Sydney Morning Herald
Moving . . . Thoughtful and provocative, written with the author's customary intelligence and quiet passion
Kirkus
[A] marvellously dexterous, tartly funny, and commanding novel of moral failings and women's quandaries, brilliantly infusing penetrating social critique with stinging irony as she considers what life makes of us and what we make of life
Booklist, starred review
The tone is relaxed, even chatty, narrative mixed with reflection and observations on changes in manners and moral . . . What it offers, convincingly, interestingly, and often charmingly, is a picture of a changing world . . . Margaret Drabble has written a novel in which she has resisted the temptation to form it into a pleasing work of art, instead offering a picture of life as one thing after another. Yet it is a version of a good life that she very winningly offers us, a life irradiated by kindness
Scotsman
This new novel by a tireless chronicler of our times returns to key Drabble themes, her voice as strong and shrewd as ever
i
Margaret Drabble's new novel radiates the kind of intelligent ability, breadth and wry insight that comes with a lifetime's practice of thinking and writing. Reading it as relaxingly satisfying as sinking into luxury upholstery
Book Oxygen
Drabble's insightful characterisation and beautifully written prose make this a deeply absorbing read
The Gazette
A contemplative, moving and compelling portrait of a fiercly devoted mother and her symbolic "pure gold" daughter
The Leader
Drabble's insightful characterisation and beautigully written prose make it a deeply absorbing read
Aberdeen Evening Express
Drabble's voice is both commanding and conversational
Sunday Herald
A London that is rather more quiet and textured than the loud and globalised bankers' capital it has become today, and described perfectly in Drabble's distinctive, finely grained prose
KIRSTY GUNN
Scotsman, Books of the Year
Drabble's writing has the beautiful deep polish of the lid of a Steinway. Her social observations are often uncomfortably spot-on and there are some wonderfully wry asides
Literary Review
A tender, moving, wonderfully wise portrait of a family
Saga Magazine
She writes not about exemplary women, but about real ones
New York Review of Books
Shrewd, considered, many-layered in its almost anthropological examination of a culture and a period, this is a welcome return to the novel form for one of our finest writers
Good Book Guide
An intelligent book about the way we interpret our inner lives
Culture, Sunday Times
A novel of themes
Seven, Sunday Telegraph
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