Excerpt from The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Paul is a gingery fellow, sandy-haired and -lashed, lightly freckled, strikingly pale-skinned, pleasantly featured in a snub-nosed boyish way, in his mid forties she supposes, a little younger than her son Christopher. Hazel eyes, not Viking blue. He had wanted to be an architect but the qualifications took too long, he'd needed to start earning, and he had settled for planning and housing. His views on aesthetics (not often requested) are surprising. He has a nostalgic private weakness for Modernism, but recognises that most old people in England detest Modernism (not that they get asked much about their preferences) and prefer a post-modern pseudo-cottage, bungalowesque, mini-Tesco mix. You can get all those features into a housing estate quite easily, as he knows from the avenues and crescents of Hagwood.

His expertise lies in adaptation. He really knows, or thinks he knows, how features of a dwelling space ought to be adapted to the ageing and disabled, to the increasingly ageing and increasingly disabled. He relies on Fran, who is well ahead of him on the road of ageing (though as yet far from disabled) to advise him and offer him her insights. He had been fascinated by her account of the woman who had died because she hadn't been able to open the bathroom door. There was nothing much wrong with her, apart from her loss of grip. She'd been unable to turn the doorknob, couldn't get out to the phone to dial 999 after a very minor stroke, and had passed away on her cold bathroom floor.

If she'd had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she'd have been alive today. If she hadn't shut the door after herself (and what on earth was the point in doing that, as she lived alone?), she'd have been alive today.

Killed by a doorknob.

For the lack of a nail the battle was lost.

You have to be careful, when you're old.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Fran declines a beer. I'll see you down here at seven, she says. And up she goes to her room, to kick off her boots and lie on her bed and gaze at the rich daily life of the Black Country and the West Midlands. It's on the chilly side in her bedroom, there must be a thermostat somewhere, but she can't find it. Never mind, you can't die of hypothermia in a Premier Inn.

She likes her bedroom. She likes the whiteness of the pillows, and the rich loud purple of the Inn's informative boasts about its reliable facilities and its notable breakfasts. It's very purple, the Premier Inn branding.

Excerpted from The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble. Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Drabble. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.