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At a time when illegitimacy is taboo, Rosamund is pregnant after her only sexual encounter. Despite her independence and academic brilliance, she is naive and unworldly and her choices are terrifying. But in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds a love she has never known before.

This is a beautifully written and deeply personal book on the jigsaw puzzle and the part it plays in the puzzle of its distinguished author's life. It is a mix of memoir, jigsaw history and the strange delights of puzzling. In The Pattern in the Carpet, Maragret Drabble describes the history of this uniquely British form of meditation, from its earliest incarnation as a dissected map, used as a teaching tool in the late 18th century, to the other cut-outs and mosaics that have amused children and adults from Roman times until today. Woven carefully through her account are the author's intimate memories of her Auntie Phyl - her childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first visit to London together, the books they read and, above all, the jigsaws that they completed.

This novel goes back through the lives of three women, a psychoanalyst, an art historian and a good woman who all met at Cambridge in the 1950s.

Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive, as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history. Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey Northern sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was already a serious child, drawn towards the underwater world of marine biology, but there were as yet few signs of Ailsa's dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity. The novel traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future.