At 16, Precious is pregnant by her father again and, as the baby starts to show inside her, is expelled from school, and sent to an alternative centre for children with difficulties, called Each One Teach One. It tells the tale of Precious Jones, a 16-year-old black girl who has never been out of Harlem, who has suffered the worst kind of childhood abuses you could imagine. Not exactly Operation Gomorrah or anything.Readable enough in its second half, once the action belatedly starts, the novel nevertheless contains a quantity of snide remarks about book reviewers, invariably a sign that the author is conscious of failure and expects bad notices May Drabble soon return to form.. It's unusual for a book to make me cry, or, for that matter, to make me vomit. Push, a novel by an American writer called Sapphire, produced both reactions. Indeed, for the overkill...There will be one or two deaths, but not many." So, not an overkill at all, then.

The English are clumsy and gross and at the same time runtish They do not make the best of themselves. Their bodies are thick, their faces are either pinched and beaky like mean birds or shapeless as potatoes." Is Drabble speaking for herself here? She doesn't seem to be speaking for David Niven, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh or Julie Christie. And "pure- bred English" is a stupidly racist contradiction in terms.Nearing the end, the narrator says, "We are nearing the end Soon we can go for the kill. The pure-bred English are a motley, mottled, mongrel ugly breed, blotched with all the wrong pigments, with hair that does not do much for them at all. You see it coming the instant Drabble introduces him, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear.Will Paine, a character intended to be catalytic but really just peripheral, is half-Jamaican and, we are told, "too nice-looking to be pure-bred English. There are no landlord- tenant relations involved.Nathan's mother, meanwhile, doesn't like him living in his trendy South Bank block because there's an E in the postcode, an ugly reminder of the East End their Jewish family worked hard to escape from We are told she "hasn't moved with the times. She won't even eat food with an E in it." Surely a preoccupation with E-numbered food additives is as neurotically modern as you can get?David D'Anger, a suave Guyanese academic married to another of the sisters, is repeatedly described, because of his dazzling powers of persuasion, as "dangerous".