The Millstone
Margaret Drabble
Available as Paperback, eBook
An award-winning novel about the perils of motherhood in a failing healthcare system and a woman’s fight against the social stigma of the Sixties
Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood.
‘Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine’ – Sunday Times
“I have learned so much from Margaret Drabble’s work. Her prose is very beautiful, very funny, and at the same time very serious. Novels like The Millstone and Jerusalem the Golden have helped me to understand what great writing can be”
Sally Rooney
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“A beautiful book – and a momentous one”
guardian
“The novelist who will have done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London”
new York Times
“A timeless fable about the condition of womanhood … Drabble’s vision of woman’s fate remains challenging, controversial, relevant and profound”
Elaine Showalter
“Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine”
sunday Times
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of twenty highly acclaimed novels. 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.
