Episode description

This month World Book Club is talking to the acclaimed British writer Margaret Drabble about her remarkable novel The Millstone.

At a time when illegitimacy is taboo, Rosamund Stacey is pregnant after a one-night stand. Despite her independence and academic brilliance, she is naïve and unworldly and the choices before her are daunting. She must adapt to life as a single mother, but in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds a depth of feeling she has never known before.

The Millstone conjures a London of the sixties that is not quite yet swinging and where sexual liberation has not quite yet arrived.

(Picture: Margaret Drabble. Photo credit: Ruth Corney.)