Emma, a young wife and mother living in London at the end of the Swinging Sixties, has been offered an exciting job - she is to be one of the first female newsreaders. Intelligent and attractive, with a passion for facts and a mild yearning for notoriety, she can't wait. But then her husband David, an egocentric actor, demands that she accompany him to Herefordshire for a season at a provincial theatre festival. Faced with seven months of rural tedium, Emma begins to look elsewhere for entertainment, and finds her eyes settling on producer Wyndham. Full of charm and scandal, broken props and nasty bruises, THE GARRICK YEAR is a dazzling portrait of a marriage in crisis, and a woman determined to have more.

Author Biography

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of nineteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies and screenplays, and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.