Most Popular Books by Penelope Lively

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 vibrant new novel from Penelope Lively—a wry, wise story about the surprising ways lives intersect Look out for Penelope Lively’s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. 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. Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people''s lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet. Brought to life in her hallmark graceful prose and full of keen insights into human nature, How It All Began is an engaging, contemporary tale that is sure to strike a chord with her legion of loyal fans as well as new readers. A writer of rare wisdom, elegance, and humor, Lively is a consummate storyteller whose gifts are on full display in this masterful work.

“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

An “abundantly rich collection” of short stories by the Man Booker Prize–winning author (The New York Times Book Review). In Pack of Cards, Penelope Lively shares moments in the everyday world that are not always open to observation, as she delves into the minutiae of her characters’ lives. Whether she writes about a widow on a visit to Russia, a small boy’s consignment to boarding school, or an agoraphobic housewife, Lively takes the reader behind a closed curtain, through the locked door, and into a world that seems at first mundane—then proves to be uniquely memorable. “Witty, profoundly civilized . . . This captivatingly intelligent collection confirms Lively’s place as one of Britain’s most imaginative and important contemporary writers.” —Library Journal

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 seductive and hugely suspenseful novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively, about what can happen when you look too closely into the past Man Booker Prize–winning novelist Penelope Lively’s masterpiece opens with a snapshot: Kath, before her death, at an unknown gathering, holding hands with a man who is not her husband. The photograph is in an envelope marked “DON’T OPEN—DESTROY.” But Kath’s husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secrets—within marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her—and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched. Propelled by the author’s signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best.

"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 Look out for Penelope Lively’s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. Penelope Lively is renowned for her signature combination of silken storytelling and nuanced human insights. In Family Album, lively masterfully peels back one family''s perfect façade to reveal the unsettling truths. All Alison ever wanted was to provide her six children with a blissful childhood. Its creation, however, became an obsession that involved Ingrid, the family au pair. As adults, Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger, and Clare return to their family home and as mysteries begin to unravel, each must confront how the consequences of long-held secrets have shaped their lives.

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).

Look out for Penelope Lively’s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. Hailed by critics as a benchmark in a career full of award-winning achievements, Making It Up is Penelope Lively''s answer to the oft-asked question, "How much of what you write comes from your own life?" What if Lively hadn''t escaped from Egypt, her birthplace, at the outbreak of World War II? What would her life have been like if she''d married someone else? From a hillside in Italy to an archaeological dig, the author explores the stories that could have been hers, fashioning a sublime dance between reality and imagination that confirms her reputation as a singular talent.

The Booker Prize winning author''s sweeping saga of three generations of women "One of the most accomplished writers of fiction of our day" (The Washington Post ) follows the lives and loves of three women--Lorna, Molly, and Ruth--from World War II-era London to the close of the century. Told in Lively''s incomparable prose, this is a powerful story of growth, death, and renewal, as well as a penetrating look at how the major and minor events of the twentieth century changed lives. By chronicling the choices and consequences that comprise one family''s history, Lively offers an intimate and profound reaffirmation of the force of connection between generations.

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

A brilliantly funny original short story from Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. ''Anyone artistic needed Abroad in the 1950s.'' Paul and his girlfriend are artists in need of subject matter. Arresting, evocative subject matter. So they decide to go Abroad, as much as possible, for as long as possible. Because Abroad is full of well furnished scenery. Particularly peasants. Real, earthy, traditional peasants. Except you shouldn''t really call them peasants should you? ''Country people''. Abroad is full of country people. In this funny, deftly written short story, Penelope Lively satirises an arty student of the 50s, a precursor of the gap year traveller, who hasn''t learnt as much from her time Abroad as she likes to think . . . Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra''s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year''s Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

Grade level: 4, 5, 6, 7, e, i.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A collection of 14 short stories, ranging from the fantasy of Scheherazade to a dazzling example of chaos theory.

In a flooded world, from which humans have fled, a band of animals travel to London to find out what kind of animal Stanley is. Their only clue is a poster from London Zoo.

Run by Toby and Paula, the centre offers ordinary people a chance to learn from professional artists skilled in poetry, sculpture, ceramics, and the like. Artists like Greg, the New England poet, whose works are strangely absent; or Bob the lascivious potter who sells his Toby jugs to department stores.

Rumor says that the Wild Hunt has been heard again - ghost hounds and antlered horsemen - broughtback by the revival of the ancient Horn Dance in the Somerset village of Hagworthy.

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.

Peter''s birthday gift to his grandfather of two strange-looking eggs begins a series of adventures when the eggs hatch into dragons.

When the BBC plans a programme on the dig which made archaeologist Hugh Paxton famous, a host of memories are disinterred, and lives disrupted. Kate adored her father and considers the TV scheme an intrusion. Laura Paxton, lonely and bored, is delighted at the prospect of being seen as the charming widow of a distinguished scholar. A cynical on-looker to the filming is Tom Rider, Kate''s fiance. While completing his thesis on an 18th century antiquarian, Tom observes the perplexities of being English and the parasitism of making a living out of the past. For Paxton''s family and colleagues, the site, a Neolithic barrow, becomes the focus for recollections as selective as the filming which will in turn distort the Wiltshire scenery.

The ghost of a seventeenth-century sorcerer emerges as a poltergeist and attempts to make young James his apprentice.

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

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.

Summary: Three children concoct a witch''s brew that conjures up Morgan Le Fay in the guise of a local tycoon''s wife who immediately stirs up trouble in the village.

Relates the adventures of a variety of creatures--mice, spiders, pill bugs--that live, seen and unseen, in the nooks and crannies of an ordinary house.