Most Popular Books by Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, dying in a hospital, remembers a war-time affair with a young tank officer killed in the North African desert war.

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 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.

Two children are left to face the ramifications of the emotional hold their mother had on their lives for many years, and learn to accept what has therefore been lost.

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

A love story that connects the lives of three generations, Lorna and Matt who experience heartache during World War II, their daughter Molly, and their granddaughter Ruth, who begins a journey that takes her back to 1941.

A group of aspiring artists vists Framleigh Creative Study Centre to escape the stress of life, but their moods begin to clash when the domestic staff depart.

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).

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.

Middle-aged biographer Mark Lamming goes to Dorset to meet the grand-daughter of his new subject. His obsession with her changes his life.

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

"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.

The Road to Lichfield is the Booker Prize shortlisted first novel by Penelope Lively. Ann Linton leaves her family in Berkshire and sets up camp in her father''s house when he is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield. As she shares his last weeks she meets David Fielding, and the love they share brings her feelings into sharp focus. Deeply felt, beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of memory and identity, of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, and a future never fully anticipated. ''A searing study of the peculiar state of being in love . . . there are few contemporary novelists to match her on this subject'' Sunday Telegraph

"Judgment Day" takes readers into the life of Clare Paling, who has just moved with her family to Laddenham, a seemingly drowsy village enlivened by sideshows of adultery and gossip. With flawless precision, Lively brings the village and its inhabitants to life as an unpardonable death reminds them all that the world is a very uncertain place.

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 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.

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

Maria is spending the summer holidays with her family in Lyme Regis. She finds a sampler stitched by a girl, Harriet, in 1865 and it becomes clear that something odd happened to Harriet - but what? A Whitbread Award winner, republished in the Collins Modern Classics range.