'The Dark Flood Rises' is the latest novel - her nineteenth book - from English writer Margaret Drabble,
So many people have been introduced to Drabble's insightful writing through her early classics, including A Summerbird Cage, and The Needle's Eye - titles which repeatedly feature on lists of 'books you must read'. The more recent The Pure Gold Baby was also enjoyed considerable acclaim.
Similar to William Trevor's A Writer's Ireland: Landscape and Literature, Drabble wrote A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature, both books published by Thames and Hudson. She also is the editor of the invaluable reference book The Oxford Companion to English Literature of 1985 and 2000.
Many of her books have had correlations with her own life, her early works following the lives of young women setting out on their way in the world, while her most recent book contemplates the realities of nearing and being in the other end of life.
The title of The Dark Flood Rises has its origins in the poem The Ship of Death by DH Laurence, someone Margaret Drabble says with whom she associates such sorrow at his early death, when only in his forties. She says he wrote some wonderful and some dreadful poetry. She had first thought of calling her new book Death by Water but thought on further. The ideas for the book emerged when she was working on a BBC Radio project in The Black Country when she was interviewing many people, many of them elderly, and doing a lot of driving in her car in the process, allowing her to ruminate on private thoughts as they came into her mind.
In discussion with Sean Rocks for RTÉ Arena, she considers many subjects through the guise of her characters: the benefits of text messaging, what literature is for and the need to keep moving and being active - physically active as long as we can, as well as socially and culturally active.
As she puts it ' if you keep moving you won't get stuck'.
Listen Below - Sean Rocks talks to Margaret Drabble for RTÉ Arena:
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