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 <i>The Millstone </i>and <i>Jerusalem the Golden</i> have helped me to understand what great writing can be
- SALLY ROONEY,
A delight . . . Nothing in Rosamund's life should go as well as it does; one keeps expecting her to succumb to the cliches of 1960s unmarried motherhood and yet on she goes, skirting disaster, happy despite what anyone believes she ought to feel about her predicament
- FRANCESCA SEGAL, * Guardian *
A beautiful book - and a momentous one
* Guardian *
The novelist who will have done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London
* New York Times *
A timeless fable about the condition of womanhood . . . Drabble's vision of woman's fate remains challenging, controversial, relevant and profound
- ELAINE SHOWALTER,
Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine
* Sunday Times *
<i>The Millstone</i> is a delight and Rosamund Stacey a witty, candid chronicler
* Daily Express *
Wry and witty
* New Republic *
The novel is a paean for motherhood
* Guardian *
<i>The Millstone</i> illuminated a path that could lead forwards a future
* Irish Times *
Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Millstone is a radical celebration of the mother-child relationship. 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' - Sunday Times