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Doing jigsaws and writing about them has been one of my
strategies to defeat melancholy and avoid laments. Boswell
regretted that his friend Samuel Johnson did not play draughts after
leaving college, for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing
relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often.
Jigsaws have offered me and many others an innocent soothing
relief, and this is where this book began and where it ends.
Margaret Drabble
Excerpted from The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble. Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Drabble. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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