Penelope Lively
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination... A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award, newly republished in the Essential Modern Classics range. 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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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....
3) Moon tiger
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Claudia, a best-selling writer, recalls her life of adventure as a newspaper correspondent, novelist, lover, and mother, while the people close to her file past her hospital bed.
The elderly Claudia Hampton, a best-selling author of popular history, lies alone in a London hospital bed. Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a...
4) Consequences
Author
Language
English
Description
Consequences is a love-story-times-three that opens on the eve of the Second World War, with a chance meeting in St. James's Park, London. Wholly in love, Lorna and Matt leave the city for a cottage in a rural Somerset village. Their intimate life together is shattered when the war begins and by Matt's tragic death in action.Twenty years later, their daughter, Molly, happens upon a forgotten newspaper-a seemingly small moment that leads to her first...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2012.
Language
English
Formats
Description
The mugging of a retired schoolteacher on a London street has unexpected repercussions for her friends and neighbors when it inadvertently reveals an illicit love affair, leads to a business partnership, and helps an immigrant to reinvent his life.
8) Family album
Author
Language
English
Description
All Alison ever wanted was a blissful childhood for her six children, with summers at the beach and birthday parties on the lawn at their family home. Together with Ingrid, the family au pair, she has worked hard to create a real old-fashioned family life. But beneath its postcard sheen, the picture is clouded by a distant father, Alison's inexplicable emotional outbursts, and long-repressed secrets that no one dares mention.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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...
11) Passing on
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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,...
14) A house unlocked
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"'I thought that I would see if the private life of a house could be made to bear witness to the public traumas of a century'. Here Penelope Lively recalls Golsoncott, the country house in Somerset her grandparents bought in 1923. Through the sometimes strange, unfamiliar articles there - the gong stand, the picnic rug, the potted meat jars and bon bon dishes - she charts the social changes and transforming moments of the twentieth century. Changing...
16) Judgment day
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
1980.
Language
English
Description
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,...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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...
20) Spiderweb
Author
Publisher
HarperFlamingo
Pub. Date
[1999]
Language
English
Description
After a lifetime of danger in primitive lands, retired anthropologist Stella Brentwood finds the civilized English countryside a little dull. One day she will discover civilized natives can be even more dangerous than those in the jungle.