The Pure Gold Baby

Anna is a child of special, unknowable qualities. She is a happy child, always willing to smile at the world around her. But she also presents profound challenges. For her mother Jess, still in her early twenties, living alone in North London and hoping to embark on an adventurous career, her arrival will prove life-transforming. Over the course of decades, in ways large and small, Anna will affect the lives and loves of those around her. While Anna herself will remain largely unaltered by the passing years, she will live through a period of dramatic change, her journey illuminating our shifting attitudes towards motherhood, responsibility and the way we care for one another. Both personal and political, The Pure Gold Baby is a remarkable portrait of a family, a friendship, and a neighbourhood.It is a novel of great beauty, wisdom and stealthy power by one of our country's foremost and acclaimed writers.

About the Author :
Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. 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 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.

Review :
Extraordinary and intriguing 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 Moving and meditative Superb ... a richly complex narrative voice achieves a choric magnificence hardly equalled in her earlier work Involving and unexpectedly rich . . . a magnificent novel that confirms Drabble's status as a national treasure Subtle . . . The cadences of the prose, the kind of language used, the words that are chosen, echo the passing of the years . . . absorbing Its prose has an almost folkloric quality . . . Characters, plotlines and themes swirl and proliferate Drabble's intelligence and compassion make it a hugely rewarding read A unique and profoundly stirring book Written with compassion and bathed in a poignant glow Her distinctive narrative voice and soaring prose remain electrifying Achingly wise One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around 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 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 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 A jigsaw; its ambitious themes of parenthood, innocence, wounded children, anthropology, literature, madness, ageing, illness and love juxtaposed 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 Moving . . . Thoughtful and provocative, written with the author's customary intelligence and quiet passion [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 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 This new novel by a tireless chronicler of our times returns to key Drabble themes, her voice as strong and shrewd as ever 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 Drabble's insightful characterisation and beautifully written prose make this a deeply absorbing read A contemplative, moving and compelling portrait of a fiercly devoted mother and her symbolic "pure gold" daughter Drabble's insightful characterisation and beautigully written prose make it a deeply absorbing read Drabble's voice is both commanding and conversational 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 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 A tender, moving, wonderfully wise portrait of a family She writes not about exemplary women, but about real ones 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 An intelligent book about the way we interpret our inner lives A novel of themes A profoundly touching novel An excellent thought provoking look at life and motherhood in modern and 20th-century Britain