About the book

One hot summer afternoon in South Yorkshire, Faro sits at a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has travelled from London to the Northern mining town where generations of her family have lived and worked, to explore her own past. Decades before, in the early twentieth century, Bessie Bawtry also ponders her place in the world. A child of unusual determination and precocious intelligence, she longs for the day she will eventually escape the working-class life her ancestor would never have dreamt of leaving. The Peppered Moth explores the way we are shaped by our environment and ancestry, told with elegant prose, wry humour and captivating storytelling, through the story of one family across generations through the twentieth century. ‘Margaret Drabble is writing, not about an individual, but about a generation, or two, or more – of women . . . This is a sad tale, tenderly told, embedded in a robust family chronicle’ – Doris Lessing