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The Millstone

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Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. 
 
Margaret Drabble's The Millstone was published in 1965. Set in a London not yet quite swinging, where sexual liberation is still on its way, this prize-winning novel follows the progress of Rosamund Stacey, who becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand, and must adapt to life as a single mother - finding herself transformed in the process.

A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, Margaret Drabble'sThe Millstone won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1965. 
 
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. 
 
Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. 
 
'Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine . . . what spirit is here' Sunday Times 
 
'One of our foremost women writers' Guardian 
 
'The novelist who will have done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London' The New York Times 
 
 
Margaret Drabble was born in 1939 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the daughter of barrister and novelist John F. Drabble, and sister of novelist A.S. Byatt. She is the author of eighteen novels and eight works of non-fiction, including biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Her many novels include The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), The Gates of Ivory (1991), The Peppered Moth (2000), The Seven Sisters (2002) and The Red Queen (2004) all of which are published by Penguin. In 1980, Margaret Drabble was made a CBE and in 2008 she was made DBE. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd, and lives in London and Somerset.

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and read English at Cambridge. She was awarded a DBE in 2008. Since the 1960s she has written 17 novels - The Millstone was her third - and she has also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

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