The Realms of Gold
Margaret Drabble
Available as Paperback, eBook
9 April 2026
A luminous story of love, purpose and regret, and captures the essence of what it means to be a woman at a crossroads
What do we owe to the past? What do we owe ourselves?
Frances Wingate has it all, not least a flourishing career as an archaeologist and a razor-sharp mind. But when an old affair resurfaces – after years of on-again, off-again romance – she finds herself questioning everything she ever wanted out of life.
In The Realms of Gold, Drabble crafts a luminous story of love, purpose and regret, and captures the essence of what it means to be a woman at a crossroads.
“The Realms of Gold is thoroughly contemporary, an intelligent, artful, and affecting novel about modern people and modern disaffections”
atlantic
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”The Realms of Gold is a conspicuous pleasure to read – a cheerful reconciliation of the exactions of the past and the possibilities that lie just ahead”
kirkus Reviews
”Praise for Margaret Drabble: I have learned so much from Margaret Drabble’s work. Her prose is very beautiful, very funny, and at the same time very serious”
Sally Rooney
“One of Britain’s most dazzling writers”
new York Times
“[Her] novels brim with sharply observed life and the author’s seemingly infinite sympathy for “ordinary women””
Joyce Carol Oates
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.