Penelope Lively

"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...

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...

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...

"A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author of How It All Began 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....

Finding a mysterious photograph of his late wife, Kath, holding hands with another man, Glyn begins a search that proves shocking to Kath's family and friends.

The story of a woman, written to resemble a biography, complete with family photos. The chapter-headings tell the story: "Birth, 1905;" "Childhood, 1916;""Marriage, 1927;" "Love, 1936;" "Motherhood, 1947;""Illness and Decline, 1985;" and, finally, "Death."

Illustrations and text provide a retelling of Virgil's epic poem "The Aeneid."