A Natural Curiosity: A Novel

Alix Bowen and Liz Headleand have been friends since Cambridge. Now middle-aged, Alix and her husband Brian have settled in a small town in the moors of northern England. Politically liberal and attracted to the unknown, Alix has developed a friendship with a convicted murderer, having promised to help him find his long-lost mother. Liz, a successful psychiatrist and socially well-connected, has an insatiable desire to understand the psyches of strangers, while putting her own on hold. But when her sister, Shirley, makes a drastic life change, Liz is forced to turn her ever-observant eye inward, discovering things about herself she had buried deep within. In this stunning return to the beloved friends of The Radiant Way, Margaret Drabble once more shows us a world rich and wonderfully nuanced, with her singular wit and keen insight.