Description

1979. Three old Cambridge friends are brought together at a party to celebrate New Year’s Eve and the end of a decade. Esther, Liz and Alix first met in Cambridge in the early Fifties, a time when their futures held glittering promise. But with the dawn of the Thatcher era, everything changed. Now middle-aged, how will these confident women cope with the personal and professional challenges they will come to face?

‘A sublime example of Drabble’s mastery in unravelling the intricacies of intimate relationships’ – The Times

Publisher Review

Enormous in scope and profound in sympathy, it hits every note from exquisitely trivial detail to ludicrous daily comedy to numbing tragedy. Essential reading! -- MARGARET ATWOOD The emotional withdrawal proposed to us in The Radiant Way is truly radical . . . This novel is a valuable specimen of a new consciousness * * New York Times * * A sublime example of Drabble's mastery in unravelling the intricacies of intimate relationships * * The Times * * Humane, intelligent, engrossing * * Independent * * An important book - entertaining, sad, witty, lively, dense with detail * * Evening Standard * * The novels brim with sharply observed life and the author's seemingly infinite sympathy for "ordinary women" * * New Yorker * * In Britain, Drabble tells us, ambition and idealism are damned equally. The women survive, detached from the world they were so engaged in a decade earlier. The men do worse . . . Drabble surrounds her chilling message - violent disintegration lurks just under the surface - with all kinds of skilful social detail . . . when she takes off into her own elegant figures and jumps, she puts on quite a show * * LA Times * * Drabble's late fiction has never been scared off from attempting social chronicle as well as individual psychological dry-point * * Kirkus Reviews * * Praise for Margaret Drabble: She was one of the most assiduous chroniclers of female experience in Britain during that time. Drabble's work has always been characterised by astute social observation * * Guardian * * 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