Best Selling Books by Penelope Lively

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

''A mischievous boy hero and an equally amusing ghoul,'' Guardian An iconic ghost story for children from Penelope Lively, one of the modern greats of British fiction. Just because you can''t see them doesn''t mean they aren''t there... James is fed up. His family has moved to a new cottage - with grounds that are great for excavations, and trees that are perfect for climbing - and stuff is happening. Stuff that is normally the kind of thing he does. But it''s not him who''s writing strange things on shopping lists and fences. It''s not him who smashes bottles and pours tea in the Vicar''s lap. It''s a ghost - honestly. Thomas Kempe the 17th century apothecary has returned and he wants James to be his apprentice. No one else believes in ghosts. It''s up to James to get rid of him. Or he''ll have no pocket money or pudding ever again. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe is a timeless thriller, with a ghostly mystery and all the fun and mischief of being nine years old. Perfect for fans of Eva Ibbotson, Tom''s Midnight Garden and Helen Cresswell''s Moondial.

When the Harrisons move to an old country cottage and are beset by small domestic disasters, they assume that James is up to his tricks again. How can James explain that he''s plagued by the ghost of a 17th-century sorcerer? This play is adapted from a novel by Penelope Lively. It is designed for ten main parts: five male, four female, with one male voice off-stage; and eight additional parts - one male and others interchangeable.

Traveling an ancient country road while running away to his grandmother, a young boy glimpses events in the road''s past that help him cope with his problems of the present.

The revival of an ancient dance in an English village stirs up legendary unseen evil spirits which terrify a girl and her friend.

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.

This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise - ambushed, or so it can seem. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here. In this charming but powerful memoir, Penelope Lively reports from beyond the horizon of old age. She describes what old age feels like for those who have arrived there and considers the implications of this new demographic. She looks at the context of a life and times, the history and archaeology that is actually being made as we live out our lives in real time, in her case World War II; post war penny-pinching Britain; the Suez crisis; the Cold War and up to the present day. She examines the tricks and truths of memory. She looks back over a lifetime of reading and writing. And finally she looks at her identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others. This is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

With its feast of characters, moods and settings this collection of stories shows Penelope Lively at her most inventive. The eleven stories offer a wry, gentle, exquisitely observed view of paradise lost. A safe and summery world grows suddenly unreliable. Passion cools. Reality intrudes upon the idyll. Nothing and no one are quite as they appear to be.

A rediscovered children''s classic, winner of the 1976 Whitbread Award, from the Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal-winning author of Moon Tiger and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. 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 tragic occurred... Perfect for fans of mysteries like Tom''s Midnight Garden, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, Charlotte Sometimes, and My Friend Walter, A Stitch in Time is a classic of children''s literature, from Booker Prize, Whitbread Award, and Carnegie Medal-winning author Penelope Lively. This new HarperCollins Children''s Classics edition features an introduction by Michelle Magorian, author of Goodnight, Mister Tom.

The cat and the crow live under the huge and mysterious banyan tree. All day long they tell each other stories. One day, they decide to tell extra special stories, each of which involves them climbing inside the banyan tree

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.

The lives of a palaeontologist and a journalist are woven together when their plane makes an emergency landing at Callimbia, city of Queen Berenice, the sister and rival of the fabled Cleopatra.

In an England devoid of People a group of animal friends embarks on a voyage to the London Zoo to learn the identity of one of their members who resembles People but is small and has fur.