The Red Queen: Summary and book reviews of The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble, plus links to an excerpt from The Red Queen and a biography of Margaret Drabble.
The Red Queen
by Margaret Drabble
Hardcover: Oct 2004,
352 pages.
Paperback: Oct 2005,
348 pages.
Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an
unexpected package-a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more
than two hundred years ago. A highly appropriate gift for her impending
trip to Seoul. But from whom?
The story she avidly reads on the plane turns out to be one of great
intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in
extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the
family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own
hand. Perhaps it is the loss of a child that resonates so deeply with
Barbara . . . but she has little time to think of such things, she has
just arrived in Korea.
She meets a certain Dr. Oo, and to her surprise and delight he offers to
guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess. As she explores
the inner sanctums and the royal courts, Barbara begins to feel a strong
affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life.
After a brief, intense, and ill-fated love affair, she returns to
London. Is she ensnared by the events of the past week, of the past two
hundred years, or will she pick up her life where she left it? A
beautifully told and ingeniously constructed novel, this is Margaret
Drabble at her best.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.
Publishers Weekly
Nimbly jumping across time and around the globe, Drabble artfully stitches together the disparate strands of both women's lives with "a scarlet thread... of blood and joy." The voices of the dead reach out to the living, where the ancient and the modern "pass through one another, like clouds of bees, like distant galaxies... like the curving spirals of a double helix."
Booklist - Donna Seaman
Drabble is sleight-of-hand adept at slipping profoundly insightful musings on human nature, history, and social mores into scintillating and all-consuming novels.
San Francisco Chronicle
A deliciously evocative tale of palace intrigue...one of the most inventive works of fiction in recent memory.
Chicago Tribune
Drabble's tale is a love song to literature, an illustration as to how reader and subject become intertwined.
Village Voice
Drabble's plain narrative tenaciousness gives her writing transparency and fire.
An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, exploring how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.
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After hearing the interview on NPR with the author, Ayad Akhtar, I was intrigued.
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