The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble (Viking, £16.99)

MARGARET Drabble is not the sort of person I would like to get stuck with at a party. If the afterword to her new novel - her first for five years - is anything to go by, she is a sombre woman who emerged from the cocoon of an uncomfortable childhood not entirely unscathed.

"I wrote this book to try to understand my mother better," she says. "I went down into the underworld to look for my mother, but I couldn't find her. She wasn't there.

"It's all very well, imagining a happy ending... It wasn't like that... If I try very hard, I can induce in myself a brief, unconvincing, unsustainable trance of happy memory."

The Peppered Moth is based on the life of her mother Kathleen Marie Bloor. Like her, the central character Bessie Bawtry is a gifted yet not particularly likeable child living in a bleak South Yorkshire town. She studies hard, makes it to Cambridge, struggles through her exams in a constant state of hypochondria, and then marries a boy from back home for reasons known only to herself.

And that is one of the major sticking points with this novel: while Drabble's imagination runs free with the lives of subsequent generations, she seems unable to give a fully-rounded portrait of her mother or explain the reasons behind her self-obsessed, bitter behaviour.

She constantly asks why and what if, but is unable to answer, leaving the reader feeling unsatisfied and somewhat apathetic towards Bessie, her daughter Chrissie, and her daughter's daughter Faro. Too much is left unsaid in this novel, but perhaps that simply reflects the uncommunicative nature of the author's own difficult and uncompromising mother.

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at the Mount School in York before gaining a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English. She was awarded a CBE in 1980 and is editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.