Penelope Lively

"A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner "Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes...

A love story that connects the lives of three generations, Lorna and Matt who experience heartache during World War II, their daughter Molly, and their granddaughter Ruth, who begins a journey that takes her back to 1941.

"Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to hear things that aren't there-- a swing creaking, a dog barking-- and when she sees a Victorian embroidered picture, Maria feels a strange connection with the ten-year-old, Harriet, who stitched it. But what happened to her? As Maria becomes more lost in Harriet's world, she grows convinced that something...

When Dorothy Glover dies, ending her reign of terror, siblings Helen and Edward Daimler, both middle-aged and unmarried, are left ill equipped to move forward and lead their own healthy, independent lives. But as time passes, the two slowly learn to accept what has been lost in their own lives and begin to embrace what can still be retrieved. Writing with both wit and compassion, Lively conjures up Edward and Helen's dilemmas with uncommon sympathy,...

Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, TV historian Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen. Taken in high summer, many years before, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn's mind fills with questions. Who was the man? Who took the photograph? Where was it taken? When? Worst of all: had Kath planned for him to find out all along? The Photography is a literary, psychologically complex novel of suspense...

When retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of friends and strangers alike.

Paleontologist Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in the imaginary country of Callimbia. Journalist Lucy Faulkner, on assignment to write a travel piece for a Sunday magazine, is on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that bring love and take away joy, and that reveal the precariousness of our existence. With intelligence,...

"From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden...

"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...