The Peppered Moth - Couverture souple

“Margaret Drabble is writing, not about an individual, but about a generation, or two, or more – of women....This is a sad tale, tenderly told, embedded in a robust family chronicle.”
–Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

In the late nineteenth century, lepidopterists observed that the pigmentation of the Peppered Moth differed according to its environment. In the industrial North, it adopted a speckled pattern of pigmentation, effective camouflage against predators among the soot and grime. In her latest novel – a mosaic of fiction, lightly fictionalised family history, memory and social history – Margaret Drabble adopts the Peppered Moth as title and emblem of her themes, most particularly those of genetic inheritance and survival.”
–Independent on Sunday

“The Peppered Moth achieves moments of real insight and pathos....This is by any standard an exceptional book.”
–Saturday Telegraph

“This is an intensely moving, thought-provoking piece of writing whose central portrait – of a life marred by inertia and lovelessness – thumps in your head long after the last page is read.”
–Mail on Sunday

“Drabble’s excavation of life in the north from the 1920s to the 1940s is rich in social and domestic detail.”
–New Statesman
From the Hardcover edition.

The Bawtry family has been in South Yorkshire for generations when Bessie is born just before the turn of the last century. The Bawtrys have been content with their humble lot, but Bessie longs for the freedom promised by a new beginning. However, when she succeeds in being admitted to Cambridge and ascends to a new world of culture and rarified comforts, the tug of her family’s history remains, binding her to the past in ways she doesn’t entirely understand. Nearly a century later, Faro Gaulden finds her way back to the little mining town where her mother and her grandmother Bessie grew up. But for all Faro’s exotic ancestry and glamour, she wonders if she has really travelled away from home, and finds herself asking how is it that unforeseen events and encounters can alter forever what would seem to have been determined. Abounding with lively characters, sadness, and subversive wit, this is Margaret Drabble at her storytelling best.

From the Hardcover edition.