Excerpt from The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Doing jigsaws and writing about them has been one of my strategies to defeat melancholy and avoid laments. Boswell regretted that his friend Samuel Johnson did not play draughts after leaving college, ‘for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often’. Jigsaws have offered me and many others an innocent soothing relief, and this is where this book began and where it ends.

Margaret Drabble

Excerpted from The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble. Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Drabble. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.