Summary: A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, first published as a Penguin Essential. It’s the swinging sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced in a time when sexual liberation is already on the rise. She hides her ignorance behind a facade of independence and becomes pregnant as a result of a one-night stand. Although single parenthood is not yet socially accepted, she decides to have the baby instead of opting for an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed through motherhood. 'Rosamund is wonderful, a true Drabble heroine... what a spirit is present here' - Sunday Times. 'One of our most significant writers' - Guardian. 'The novelist who has done for late twentieth-century London what Dickens did for Victorian London' - The New York Times.