A Natural Curiosity. - Couverture souple

“A brilliantly accomplished and wonderfully entertaining morality tale for our times.”
–Vancouver Province

“Drabble’s observations are everywhere translated into a wry humour with a bite that bruises more than tragedy itself....”
–Globe and Mail

“Clearly a novelist with a social conscience, and with a firm grasp on the hearts and minds of the English middle class, Drabble is like a contemporary Dickens.”
–Toronto Star

“[Drabble creates] a fascinating cross-section of convincing imaginary lives. She credits her readers with natural curiosity, then amply rewards them.”
–Time Magazine

“An excellent, artful and acute novel....Drabble harnesses her journalistic impressions to a novelist’s invention and leaves us in stunned, even cheerful contemplation (God help us) of the meaning of life.”
–Montreal Gazette

“[Drabble is] a perennially entertaining and intelligent novelist who can always be relied upon for a provocative as well as a good read.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“An intriguing page-tuner....Drabble’s characters are too intelligent to become enmeshed in melodrama. Their voices are vigorous, their actions compelling....Thoughtful and compassionate....”
–London Free Press

“Drabble’s characters have lodged themselves in my mind....The compelling vitality of the characters with their attendant curiosity buoys up the novel”
–Edmonton Journal

“Margaret Drabble has defined our times better than any other woman novelist....The novel stands on its own as a great document of British life at the end of the century....Energizing.”
–Chatelaine

“[Drabble] invites us to see beyond the filth and horror of modern life to the world of possibilities in our own lives, where we also have the power to write our own endings.”
–Winnipeg Free Press

“[Drabble’s] talent for observing contemporary Britain – political, social and economic –is as intelligent as ever....”
–Hamilton Spectator

“With humour and sympathy, Drabble uses [her characters’] stories to illuminate the social decay in Britain (and by extension all of the West) through a series of powerful images, from serial murder to suicide.”
–Books in Canada

Rich in character and incident, A Natural Curiosity sweeps the reader from smart London townhouses to a run-down embassy in the Middle East, from the splendours of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to drowsy afternoons in the hills of sunny Italy, as we re-encounter Alix, Liz, and Esther, three erudite, middle-aged, Cambridge-educated women living in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The story opens in 1987, when Alix, a conscientious social worker, befriends a convicted killer, when a dazed housewife begins an affair with a stranger after her husband’s suicide, and a comfort-loving TV executive undertakes to rescue a friend who’s been kidnapped by terrorists. A Natural Curiosity is wondrous and astute, and in Margaret Drabble’s hands, the seemingly improbable becomes vividly real.