The Dark Flood Rises

Fran herself is already too old to die young, and too old to avoid bunions and arthritis, moles and blebs, weakening wrists, incipient but not yet treatable cataracts, and encroaching weariness… What would the balance sheet look like, at the last reckoning? Fran may be old but she's not going without a figh So she dyes her hair, enjoys every glass of red wine, drives around the country for her job with a housing charity and lives in an insalubrious tower block that her loved ones disapprove of. And as each of them - her pampered ex Claude, old friend Jo, flamboyant son Christopher and earnest daughter Poppet - seeks happiness in their own way, what will the last reckoning be? Will they be waving or drowning when the end comes? By turns joyous and profound, darkly sardonic and moving, The Dark Flood Rises questions what makes a good life, and a good death. This triumphant, bravura novel takes in love, death, sun-drenched islands, poetry, Maria Callas, tidal waves, surprise endings - and new beginnings. ‘Drabble couldn’t have written about the indignities, pains and general “uselessness” of old age any better.’ – The Independent A piercing eye along the fault lines of English society Dame Margaret Drabble has been writing since the early 1960’s when she published her first novel A Summer Bird Cage although the novel she is best-known for is 1965’s The Millstone for which she won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. An adept critic and biographer (most notably of the writer Arnold Bennett) she has also edited two volumes of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.