The Witch of Exmoor
Margaret Drabble
Available as Paperback, eBook
9 April 2026
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Frieda Palmer – an eccentric, brilliant and infuriating woman with a maddening disregard for convention – has withdrawn to a decaying house by the sea on the wild edges of Exmoor.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.
“Drabble skewers the egoism of her characters and of the society they inhabit with subtle humor and elegant psychological analysis”
la Times
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“[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
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.