The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsawsis an original and brilliant work. Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries about jigsaw puzzles — did you know that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales? — Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first trip to London together, the books they read, the jigsaws they completed. She offers penetrating sketches of her parents, her siblings, and her children; she shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writing, on aging and memory. And she does so with her customary intelligence, energy, and wit. This is a memoir like no other.
A beautifully written and deeply personal book, a mix of memoir, jigsaw history, and the strange delights of puzzling.
Foreword
This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like
a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw puzzle, although
that is what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. I have always
been more interested in content than in form, and I have never
been a tidy writer. My short stories would sprawl into novels, and
one of my novels spread into a trilogy. This book started off as a
small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiralled off in other directions,
and now I am not sure what it is.
I first thought of writing about jigsaws in the autumn of ????,
when my young friend Danny Hahn asked me to nominate an
icon for a website. This government-sponsored project was collecting
English icons to compose a ‘Portrait of England’, at a time
when Englishness waslƒG
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