Product DescriptionA celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 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 . . . what spirit is here' Sunday Times 'One of our foremost women writers' Guardian 'The novelist who will have done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London' The New York TimesAbout the AuthorMargaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and read English at Cambridge. She was awarded a DBE in 2008. Since the 1960s she has written 17 novels - The Millstone was her third - and she has also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.