The Red Queen

(Paperback, Main - Canons)

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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 aliveThe 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.

Reviews

'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

'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

Author Bio

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of twenty highly acclaimed novels. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.