The Radiant Way - Softcover

Drabble, Margaret

3.77

1,202 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771028776 ISBN 13: 9780771028779

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

"Ambitious and artful...Drabble reminds us why we still love to read."
NEWSWEEK
Liz, Alix and Ester have been part of one another's lives since their Cambridge days twenty-five years ago. Liz is a successful psychotherapist, Alix is a wife and mother, still pursuing politics, and Esther is an academic. As we follow them through the next five years we see their world changing around them, and we see each woman confronted with difficult, often painful, truths--about this new world, and more profoundly, about herself within it.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated at Cambridge. She was awarded a CBE in 1980. Her many novels include The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), The Gales of Victory (1991), The Peppered Moth (2000); The Seven Sisters (2002) and The Red Queen (2004) all of which are published by Penguin. Margaret Drabble is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London W10.

From Publishers Weekly:

One cannot read Drabble (The Ice Age) without being aware of the culture in which she writes; her novels are as much social and political commentary as they are acute character studies. This latest work gives us another grim picture of Britain in the '80s, a country still preoccupied with class divisions, increasingly torn by labor strife, being sucked into the chaos of random violence. The ironic title comes from a children's reading primer, which pictures a world proceeding in rational, peaceful, cooperative fashion; it is also the title of a TV documentary made by Charles Headleand, the husband of one of the three protagonists, all of whom met at Cambridge in the '50s. Liz Headleand is a Harley Street psychotherapist and mother of a large family; Alix Bowen teaches "the poor, the dull and the subnormal" in government sponsored programs; Esther Breuer is an art scholar who has pared her life to minimal terms. Among them these women experience divorce, the death of a parent and of a lover, the loss of a job and a resulting sense of dislocation, an intimation of vulnerability as a ghastly murder affects their lives. In the course of the five-year span of the novel, each comes to terms with her own nature, and with her future. As exemplars of female roles in modern culture and as reflectors of the forces fragmenting British society, Drabble's characters sometimes sound like spokespersons for her pessimistic philosophy, and there are sections of the novel where pure exposition weakens the narrative tension. On the whole, however, this is one of the best of Drabble's books, immersing the reader in a credible, relevant world.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.