Description

The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally. Dr Babs Halliwell is no longer herself.

A young girl is plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea. In her diaries, she chronicles the intrigues of courtly life and her own extraordinary existence.

Two hundred years later, the Red Queen’s ghost haunts Dr Babs Halliwell, an Oxford academic obsessed with her memoirs and possessed by the many parallels with her own complicated past. But why and how does she keep the Red Queen’s story alive?

The inimitable Margaret Drabble offers a rich and atmospheric historical novel, where the dead wander among the living and ask what it means to be remembered.

Publisher Review

I have learned so much from Margaret Drabble's work. Her prose is very beautiful, very funny, and the same time very serious -- SALLY ROONEY Each of Margaret Drabble's novels has been an accurate, honest record of its time in the idiom of its time -- URSULA K. LE GUIN Full of life * * Independent * * Utterly gripping . . . Rarely has feminist escapism been so stylishly disguised * * Guardian * * Truly fascinating . . . Cannot fail to absorb the reader * * Sunday Telegraph * * The book is a pure delight, its formal puzzles intriguing and, in quieter moments, the bonds between the two very different women wholly convincing * * Telegraph * * Elegant . . . A seductive beguiling narrator . . . Delicious history * * Daily Express * * Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives * * Kirkus Reviews * * Carefully wrought and beautifully written The Red Queen is another fine addition to the Drabble oeuvre * * Literary Review * *