Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. Now, as they journey back to receive honorary degrees from a new university there—Humphrey on the train, Ailsa flying—they take stock of their lives, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements, romantic and otherwise. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now retired; Ailsa, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender. Their mutual pasts unfold in an exquisite portrait of English social life in the latter half of the twentieth century.
PRAISE FORTHE SEA LADY
[A] tour de force . . . With lyrical originality Drabble captures the idealistic, eternally self-absorbed paradoxes of the aging baby-boom generation. The result, like its contradictory protagonists, is as sensual as a moonlit beach, as bracing as an offshore wind. People(4 stars)
A thoroughly enchanting blend of scientific erudition, social satire and domestic comedy from a novelist who continues to surprise us. Ron Charles,The Washington Post Book World
The Presentation
The winning book was about fish, and to present it, she appeared to have dressed herself as a mermaid, in silver sequinned scales. Her bodice was close-fitting, and the metallic skirt clung to her solid hips before it flared out below the knees, concealing what might once have been her tail. Her bared brown shoulders and womanly bosom rose powerfully, as she drew in her breath and gazed across the heads of the seated diners at the distant autocue. She gleamed and rippled with smooth muscle, like a fish. She was boldly dressed, for a woman in her sixties, but she came of a bold generation, and she seemed confident that the shadowy shoals of her cohort were gathered around her in massed support as she flaunted herself upon the pol“I
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