The Garrick Year

From the outside, Emma and David Evans have a perfect life. Emma is a sometimes-model, full-time mother, and sharply observant. David is a successful actor, who relocated the family from their London home to provincial Hereford, where he’s billed to star in two plays during the city’s festival season. But all is not well under the surface and it is here, far-removed from the high-brow stimulation of London, that Emma’s resentment of David—his long hours at work, his expectation that she stay home with their children, his many infidelities—boils over. Bored and lonely, she falls into the arms of David’s director, Wyndham Farrar, who is bewitched by his stubborn, stunning new lover. In The Garrick Year, Margaret Drabble has brilliantly painted a complicated, fascinating woman, and "her portrait of Emma is to the life" (The New Yorker).