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The Red Queen
The Red Queen
Jul 7, 2025 5:14 AM

Author:Margaret Drabble

The Red Queen

Set in 18th century Korea and the present day, Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen is a rich and atmospheric novel about love, and what it means to be remembered.

200 years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen's ghost decides to set the record straight about her extraordinary existence - and Dr Babs Halliwell, with her own complicated past, is the perfect envoy. Why does the Red Queen pick Babs to keep her story alive, and what else does she want from her? A terrific novel set in 18th century Korea and the present day, The Red Queen is a rich and atmospheric novel about love, and what it means to be remembered

'Elegant . . . a seductive beguiling narrator . . . delicious history' Daily Express

'One of our foremost women writers' Guardian

'Carefully wrought and beautifully written The Red Queen is another fine addition to the Drabble oeuvre' Literary Review

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.

Reviews

Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion...cinematic in its intensity

—— Robert McCrum , Guardian

Heartbreaking, funny and written with such luminous prose - he's the most brilliant, and neglected, of English writers

—— Red Magazine

Perhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank’s economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry

—— Alan Hollinghurst , New York Times

The most original, the best writer of his time

—— Rebecca West

The most gifted prose writer of his generation

—— V. S. Pritchett

Green's books remain as solid and glittering as gems- They are not, like so many contemporary novels, mere slices of life but highly successful attempts at making art give meaning to life

—— Anthony Burgess

About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him... With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with such a writer

—— Amit Chaudhuri , Guardian

Praise for Lisa Jewell

—— -

Addictively readable

—— The Times

A joy . . . a fun summer read

—— Guardian

The best romantic comedy we've read in ages

—— Company

Tackles serious issues with humour - proving that chick-lit can be intelligent, interesting and huge fun

—— Sunday Express

A triumph

—— Hello

Top marks. Fantastic

—— Heat

Lovely

—— Daily Telegraph

Moving and intelligent

—— Independent

Magnetic, unpretentious and bursting with one-liners

—— Cosmopolitan

Fans of chick-lit will understand when I say that this is a book you simply disappear into

—— Sunday Telegraph
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