A celebration of the drama & intensity of the mother-child relationship Margaret Drabble's The Millstone won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1965 It is the Swinging Sixties & Rosamund Stacey is young & inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence & 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 & 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 & others were simply misunderstood All represent their time & 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 & novelist John F Drabble & sister of novelist AS Byatt She is the author of eighteen novels & eight works of non-fiction including biographies of Arnold Bennett & 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) & The Red Queen (2004) all of which are published by Penguin In 1980 Margaret Drabble was made a CBE & in 2008 she was made DBE She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd & lives in London & Somerset