New Releases by Penelope Lively

Wry, compassionate and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively''s stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate tales of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and how small acts ripple through the generations. With two new never-before-published stories alongside treasures from her early writing days, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master.

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 to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time."

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 up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings. In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’s villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery, and even retribution—as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap. Each of these delightful stories is elevated by Lively’s signature graceful prose and eye for the subtle yet powerfully evocative detail. Wry, charming, and keenly insightful, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers.

Penelope Lively''s Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire, published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a ''history of the world . . . and in the process, my own''. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia''s life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. ''Leaves its traces in the air long after you''ve put it away'' Anne Tyler ''A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes'' Daily Telegraph ''Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished'' Literary Review

"Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived" -- Daily Telegraph (London) Rare personal reflections from “one of our most talented writers” (The New York Times Book Review), Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively At age eighty, Penelope Lively wrote this powerful and compelling ''view from old age'', reporting back on what she found. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she''s been - fragments of memories from a life well lived.

A vibrant novel from Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively—a wry, wise story about the surprising ways lives intersect When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true; an old-guard historian tries to recapture his youthful vigor with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries; and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life with the assistance of some new friends. In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other and entire lives to become irrevocably changed. Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game.

"In this haunting new novel, the act of forgetting is as strange and interesting as the power of remembering." —The New York Times Book Review An enjoyable read filled with memorable characters and secrets from Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively Allersmead is a big shabby Victorian suburban house. The perfect place to grow up for elegant Sandra, difficult Gina, destructive Paul, considerate Katie, clever Roger and flighty Clare. But was it? Now adults, the children return to Allersmead one by one. To their home-making mother and aloof writer father, and a house that for years has played silent witness to a family''s secrets. And one devastating secret of which no one speaks . . .

“A powerful, moving and beautifully wrought novel about the ways in which lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past.” —The Boston Globe Winner of the Man Booker Prize Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she’s carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt. Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia’s personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia’s impact on their world. “Emotionally, Moon Tiger is kaleidoscopic, deeply satisfying. The all too brief encounter between Claudia and Tom will surely rate as one of the most memorable of contemporary fictional affairs. This is one of the best novels I have read for years.” —The London Sunday Telegraph “It pulls us in; it engages us and saddens us. It is also unexpectedly funny . . . It leaves its traces in the air long after you’ve put it away.” —The New York Times Book Review “One of the very best Booker winners . . . it asks hard questions about memory and history and personal legacy; it’s stylistically demanding and inventive . . . a wonderful book.” —The Guardian

A Man Booker Prize–shortlisted first novel and a “searing study of the peculiar state of being in love” (The Sunday Telegraph). In The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively explores the nature of history and memory as it is embodied in the life of forty-year-old Anne Linton, who comes to her father’s aid when he is moved into a nursing home in a distant town. As she shares his last weeks, she unexpectedly learns that her father had a mistress. With this new knowledge, Linton must examine the realities of her own life—of her childhood, her marriage—and ask, what secrets has she also kept? Deeply felt and beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, and a future never fully anticipated. “Like all of Lively’s best novels, The Road to Lichfield contains beneath its modest veneer great depths of intelligence, perception and feeling.” —The Washington Post Book World

A “well crafted . . . fascinating” story of a London architect’s struggle for identity in love and career (Time Out). This is the city in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction. In London’s changing heartland, architect Matthew Halland can’t help but contemplate how the past and the present blend. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years with his daughter, and the failed marriage he has not yet put behind him. Here, too, is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But at the same time, Matthew must keep focused on the constructing of a new future for London—his latest project in Docklands—and with it he begins to forge new beginnings of his own. City of the Mind is the “lucid and complex, meditative and playful, concise and expansive” second novel from the Man Booker Prize–winning author (The Washington Post Book World).

This “beautiful and brilliant novel” follows an agnostic woman’s relationship with a religious village’s people and its past (Auberon Waugh). Judgment Day takes us into the life of Clare Paling, who has just moved with her family to Laddenham, a sleepy village enlivened only by sideshows of adultery and gossip. An avowed agnostic, Clare is nonetheless caught up in the restoration of the church, even inciting the villagers to put on a pageant that recreates the church’s dark history. With flawless precision, Penelope Lively brings the village and its inhabitants to life as an unpardonable death reminds them all that the world is a very uncertain place. [Lively is] blessed with the gift of being able to render matters of great import with a breath, a barely audible sigh, a touch. The result is wonderful writing.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Man Booker Prize–winning author “charts the efforts of a middle-aged brother and sister to begin a new life after their tyrannical mother’s death” (The New York Times). In Passing On, “the richest and most rewarding of her novels,” Penelope Lively applies her distinctive insight and consummate artistry to the story of an abusive and manipulative mother’s legacy to her children (The Washington Post Book World). 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, immersing the reader in their concerns through her careful orchestration of emotional details. “Passing On feels like real life drawn to scale, where private dreams dwarf the daily routine . . . The slow unfolding of secrets gives the book tension without melodrama.” —San Francisco Chronicle

"Nobody writes more astutely or affectingly about [love]... than Penelope Lively." -- The Washington Post An intelligent examination of alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path, from Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively In this fascinating piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks ''what if'' she had made other choices: what if she hadn''t escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? These stories offer a sublime dance between realityand imaganation, inviting the reader to ask similar questions.

Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many years earlier, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn''s work as a historian should have inured him to unexpected findings and reversals, but he is ill-prepared for this radical shift in perception. His mind fills with questions. Who was the man? Who took the photograph? Where was it taken? When? Had Kath planned for him to find out all along? As Glyn begins to search for answers, he, and those around him, find the certainties of the past and present slip away, and the picture of the beautiful woman they all thought they knew distort.

Lively takes readers on a journey of her familial country house in England, purchased by her grandparents in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change and of the family that changed with the times.

Thirty-four stories deal with a widow visiting Russia, a tour guide in Egypt, and the stresses of modern life.

A 17th century sorcerer materialises and tries to make a modern boy his apprentice. His malicious activities make it imperative to remove him - but how?

It is a long, hot summer at World''s End, a two-family grey stone cottage in the English countryside. Pauline is editing a romance novel in the smaller dwelling, and the larger part is occupied by her daughter, Teresa; Teresa''s baby; and her husband, Maurice, a writer, whose infatuation with his editor''s girlfriend is growing. Pauline fears for Teresa, who is passionately in love with her husband, for she senses Maurice''s imminent betrayal. She remembers a time when her possessive passion for Teresa''s father eroded her own youth. A stunning and unexpected denouncement irrevocably changes the order of things for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel''s end.

Fourteen stories on relations between men and women. In one story, an estranged couple find common cause in their dislike of their marriage counsellor, in another, a wife patiently waits for the right moment to reveal to her husband she knows of his infidelity.

A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author''s unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planets of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. Lively''s memoir offers us the rare opportunity to accompany a gifted writer on a journey of exploration into the mysterious world of her own childhood.

A girl''s stuffed animals, Frog, Lion, and Cat, and her doll, Mary Ann, each take her on a different bedtime adventure.

A palaeontologist by choice--and perhaps due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on the north coast of England when he was six years old--Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in an imaginary country called Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that can bring love and take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives.

On a visit to her childhood home a woman recalls the experiences she and her brother had while living there during World War II and especially the reasons they decided to run away.

When positively uncanny things begin happening in the new housing development, Tim and his grandfather realize they must do something to stop them.