The Peppered Moth - by Margaret Drabble (Paperback)

About the Book

When Faro Gaulden visits Breaseborough in South Yorkshire, she wonders what her life would have been like had her grandmother not left there as a young girl. As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself, not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be near extinction but is now enjoying a sudden resurgence.

Book Synopsis

In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned.
Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.
The Peppered Moth is a brilliant novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Witch of Exmoor

"A novelist . . . who will have done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London."-The New York Times

"Drabble skewers the egotism of her characters and of the society they inhabit with subtle humor and elegant psychological analysis . . . proves herself a master of the art."-Los Angeles Times

"Part mystery, part fairy tale . . . with a wicked, dead-on wit."-People

Praise for The Radiant Way

"The sprawling, dazzling pluralism of her novel is meant to illustrate the glimmering interconnectedness of all humanity."-The New Yorker

"This novel marks another step in one of the most interesting careers in contemporary letters. . . . It not only engrosses; it works."-Time

Praise for A Natural Curiosity

"-A masterly tapestry of characters and events . . . Drabble's fiction has achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life."-Chicago Tribune

"It is Drabble's story that beguiles us. Her main characters, successful people in relatively full possession of their lives, can still be surprised, and frequently are."-The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)