A spellbinding portrait of a troubled family and wry dissection of middle-class sentiment around legacy and social ambition

Frieda Palmer - an eccentric, brilliant and infuriating woman with a maddening disregard for convention - has withdrawn to a decaying house by the sea on the wild edges of Exmoor. Now, the question of which of her children will inherit her fortune looms large. But do any of them really deserve it?

Set against the turbulent backdrop of post-Thatcherite Britain, The Witch of Exmoor is a spellbinding portrait of a troubled family and a wry dissection of middle-class sentiment around legacy and social ambition.

Details

ISBN13: 9781837264889
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 320
Edition: Main - Canons
Publication Date: 21 Jul 2026
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication City, Country: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.9(L)x1.9(W)221
Weight (gm): 221

Author Biography

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.

Reviews

Drabble skewers the egoism of her characters and of the society they inhabit with subtle humor and elegant psychological analysis * * LA Times * *
[A] scaldingly accurate vision . . . with equal measures of comedy, sorrow and anger * * Mail on Sunday * *
A startling, mordantly funny portrait of contemporary Britain * * Kirkus Reviews * *
Swimming in the murk of post-Thatcher Britain and taking a stern but knowing view of the English bourgeoisie, this is postmodern family drama at its best * * Publishers Weekly review * *
This droll riff on King Lear manages to be both an intriguing portrait of a difficult woman and a sustained lampoon on the self-absorbed, righteous behavior of the British elite, related in prose of sustained vigor. Satire and melodrama, nicely mixed, and a thoroughly satisfying entertainment * * 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
One of the most versatile and accomplished authors of her generation * * New Yorker * *
Margaret Drabble's early novels were intimate and sprightly chronicles of the small dissatisfactions and small triumphs of young women like herself -- HILARY MANTEL * * New York Review of Books * *