The Pure Gold Baby
*Starred Review* Jess is a passionate British anthropologist eager to learn more about the children she encountered in Africa who were living with a rare genetic syndrome. Instead, she ends up staying put in 1960s London as a single mother once she has her “pure gold baby,” a beautiful, happy little girl with an atypical mind. Transforming herself into “an anthropologist of the inner world,” Jess finds plenty of customs and mind-sets to scrutinize as she seeks guidance in raising Anna, who loves to sing and make art but can’t learn to count or read. Jess dives into a far-ranging and profoundly unsettling investigation into how such children are perceived and treated. Meanwhile, her friends—Eleanor the narrator and a chorus of don’t-try-to-fool-me mothers—attempt to cast Jess as “the shining one who did not lie and did not falter.” But, of course, like everyone else, Jess struggles with the contradictory demands of love, work, friendship (particularly with a suicidal poet), and motherhood as she tries to do right by sweet, stoic Anna. Dame of the British Empire Drabble is in peak form in this marvelously dexterous, tartly funny, and commanding novel of moral failings and women’s quandaries, brilliantly infusing penetrating social critique with stinging irony as she considers what life makes of us and what we make of life.        HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given Drabble’s standing as one of the giants of world literature, elevated attention will be paid to her first novel since The Sea Lady (2007). --Donna Seaman