The Seven Sisters

Plot

Product Description When Candida Wilton arrives alone in London, divorced and rejected and without much money, she is filled with a strange sense of excitement. What can happen, at her age, to change her fortunes? How will she adjust to this shabby, violent, yet curiously attractive city? When Candida starts writing her diary, she expects that she will fill it with the small events with which she pads out her empty life, but she has always had a secret belief that despite everything she is a lucky person. And, in a sense, she is right, for when an unexpected windfall brings her sudden riches, her horizons broaden: she will start, she thinks, with a trip abroad... Amazon.com Review It's hard to get across just how flat-out thrilling, how readable, how absorbing is Margaret Drabble's novelThe Seven Sisters. It sounds positively dull when you describe it: Candida Wilton, a faculty wife of late middle age, has been dumped by her allegedly do-gooder husband. Her three daughters aren't too impressed with her, either. The mousy Candida decamps to an inglorious flat in London, where she measures out her time in visits to the health club, trips to the grocery store, and her weekly evening class on Virgil. She tentatively makes a few new friends and rediscovers some old ones. This opening section of the book, told in diary form, is a marvel of tone. With very little action, Drabble makes Candida's forays into the world quietly electrifying. One of her new pleasures is recording in her diary her mounting dislike of her ex-husband. You sense a giddy freedom: "Andrew had come to seem to me to be the vainest, the most self-satisfied, the most self-serving hypocrite in England. That kindly twinkle in his eyes had driven me to the shores of madness." Ah, but there's more life for Candida yet. A small, unexpected inheritance is left to her, and so she organizes her friends--all female, mostly aged, mostly unmarried--into a tour of Naples as Virgil describes it in The Aeneid. Their holiday is a fictional tour-de-force: by turns a hilarious send-up of group dynamics, a metafictional lark, a feminist rant, and a dark acknowledgement of Candida's mortality. In the end, Drabble's novel is a very serious one, and a very good one. --Claire Dederer From Library Journal Drabble returns with another novel featuring an intelligent woman facing late middle age alone. Like the protagonists of The Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor, Candida Wilton finds herself in a sad predicament partially of her own making. Although the divorce following her headmaster husband's betrayal was shattering, Candida's subsequent estrangement from her daughters has roots in her rather cold personality, and it was wholly her choice to move from her Suffolk home to a seedy section of London. Naturally reserved and more than a little snobbish, she nevertheless struggles to build a new life, recording her progress in a laptop computer diary (in which Candida reveals herself as the least candid of narrators). A sudden change in finances sends Candida to Tunisia and Italy, following the journeys of Virgil's Aeneas in the company of six spiritual "sisters," which leads to unexpected plot twists. The author's clever observations and well-crafted prose move the narrative along and manage to sustain reader interest in, and even arouse sympathy for, a character who describes herself accurately as having "much to be ashamed about." For most fiction collections.--Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Drabble's shrewd and charming diarist-narrator escaped the prison of her unhappy marriage after the death of a student led to exposure of her head-master husband's affair with the girl's mother. Candida chooses not to stay in Suffolk and strangle in the web of gossip but rather to purchase a condo in a not altogether safe yet intriguingly multicultural London neighborhood. There she de