Penelope Lively – författare

Winner of the Booker Prize, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger is the tale of a historian confronting her own, personal history, unearthing the passions and pains that have defined her life. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Anthony Thwaite.Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: 'a history of the world ... and in the process, my own'. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.Penelope Lively (b. 1933) was born in Cairo. 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 novels include Passing On, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave, and many are published by Penguin.If you enjoyed Moon Tiger, you might like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'It's a fine, intelligent piece of work, the kind that Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away'Anne Tyler'Funny, thoughtful ... a perfect example of the Lively art' Mark Lawson, Independent

Treasures of Time is the twelfth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively, a spellbinding story of the dangers of digging up the dark secrets of the past. This edition features an introduction by Selina Hastings.Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.Penelope Lively's Treasures of Time was published in 1979, and is an acutely observed study of marriage and manipulation. When the BBC want to make a documentary about acclaimed archaeologist Hugh Paxton, his widow Laura, daughter Kate and her fiancé Tom are a little nervous: digging up the past can also disturb the present . . . 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 hugely satisfying and romantic novel, Consequences plots the lives of three generations of twentieth-century women.In 1935, privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life. Falling for a pennyless and bohemian artist, Matt, she abandons her stuffy Kensington existence in London and moves to a rustic cottage in Somerset. A baby, Molly, is born, but the coming war takes Matt - and Lorna's dreams - away.Lorna's decisions and their unforeseeable consequences come to shape the stories first of her daughter, Molly, and then her granddaughter, Ruth.Consequences tells of three generations of women in their own twentieth-century times united by their shared experiences of love, pain, fate and happiness . . .'A flawlessly constructed mini-epic that will delight' Daily Telegraph'Nourishing fare from a writer on sparkling form' Daily Mail

A respected literary biographer, Mark is working on the life of Gilbert Strong - a writer about whom he thinks he knows everything. Happily married, and apparently dedicated to a life of letters, he nevertheless falls in love with Strong's granddaughter Carrie, a vague and unsophisticated young woman more interested in bedding plants than books or passion. As Mark's obsessions develop over a hot, complicated summer, he begins to understand that nothing is ever what it seems; not Gilbert Strong, and certainly not himself.According to Mark is a witty and moving look at love, literature and the dangers of middle-aged folly.

From Penelope Lively, winner of the Booker PrizeWhen . . . Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter Rose cannot accompany her employer Lord Peters to Manchester, which means his niece Marion has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is . . . just the beginning in the ensuing chain of life-altering events.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.'Contains some of Lively's funniest and most enjoyable character studies . . . she remains a sublime storyteller'Guardian'Deeply comical, essentially kind-hearted, wonderfully written and seasoned with a rare wisdom' Literary Review'More stylish than many writers half her age . . . Lively knows a thing or two about storytelling . . . her candour is refreshing, and reminds us that you don't have to lie to yourself to live life finely until the very end' The Times

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 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 ghostly mysteries like `Tom’s Midnight Garden’.

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination…A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award,republished in the Collins 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 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 ghostly mysteries like ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’.

'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.

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 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

Judgement Day is the third novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.Settled into the drowsy village life of Laddenham, where she is playing camp follower to her highly successful husband - clever, agnostic and interested - Clare Paling discovers that small communities offer interesting sideshows of adultery, gossip and carefully adhered to pecking orders. It takes the pageant celebrating the church's fourth centenary and an unpardonable death to remind Clare, who had almost forgotten, that the world is a very uncertain place.'Beautiful and brillliant' Auberon Waugh'I find Penelope Lively almost excessively gifted . . . the most enjoyable novel I have read for a very long time indeed' The TimesPenelope 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.

Next to Nature, Art is the fourth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.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. As the latest group of students arrives, tensions begin to run high and artistic temperaments are much on display. In fact much more is learnt about expressing oneself than was ever suggested on the prospectus.'Delightful . . . complex and exquisite. Penelope Lively's prose is beautiful and spare and she is a master of understatement' Daily Telegraph'Her economy and wit are apparent on every page . . . it all leads to a splendid climax . . . wonderful, sensible, funny Penelope Lively' Evening Standard

Perfect Happiness is the fifth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope LivelyFrances, happily married for many years, and suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steve has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonizingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth-century - death and grief.'A triumph' Spectator

Passing On is the eighth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.Helen is fifty-two and Edward forty-nine when Dorothy, their mother, dies, ending her reign of terror and leaving them ill-equipped to deal with their lives. Timid, cautious and naive, Helen makes the charming Giles Carnaby, familiy solicitor, the object of a belated schoolgirl crush, while Edward, free to express his sexuality at last, finds it gets the better of him. Dorothy may be dead and buried, but her iron grip continues to hold them in its power.'Passing On is about the essential difficulty of being English, of coping with peculiarly English varieties of guilt, nostalgia, frustration and desire' Observer'Lively is at her sharpest, alert to every conceivable irony' Jonathan Coe, Guardian

City of the Mind is the second novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively'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 is aware of how the past and the present blend. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years of his daughter Jane and the failed marriage that he has almost put behind him. Here too is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But Matthew is occupied with constructing a new future for London in Docklands, and with it he begins to forge new beginnings of his own.'A glorious novel' Observer'The descriptions of the London Blitz are achingly real' Sunday Telegraph

Cleopatra's Sister is the tenth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.Detached and unwordly paleontologist Howard Beamish is on a journey that is to change his life. Travelling to Nairobi, his plane is forced to land in Marsopolis, the capital of Callimbia, where Cleopatra's sister entertained Antony. Also on the flight is Lucy Faulkner, a journalist with a sketchy knowledge of Callimbia's political turbulence. As chance throws them together, Howard and Lucy become embroiled in a revolution that is both political and personal.'Every sentence is a pleasure to read' Sunday Express'A fluent, funny, ultimately moving romance in which lovers share centre stage with Lively's persuasive meditations on history and fate. . .a book of great charm with a real intellectual resonance at its core' The New York Times Book Review

Beyond the Blue Mountains is a collection of short stories by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.The fourteen warmly humorous stories in Beyond the Blue Mountains range from the fantasy of Scheherazade to a dazzling example of chaos theory, depicting in exquisite prose the subtle but significant events that go to create everyday experience.'Penelope Lively at her most polished and perceptive' Sunday Times'Lively is a genius and this collection is a joy' Daily Mail

Spiderweb is the twelfth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.Stella Brentwood has led an exotic life for a woman of her time. Her frivolous best friend at Oxford, Nadine, knew early what she wanted: marriage and children. Stella, too, has had her share of passion, but her work as an anthropologist - always the outsider, the observer, was her priority.Now she has decided to root herself in Somerset landscape. But she finds that village society in England us far more chaotic, more unpredictable, and even more cruel, than she has known before. And that she cannot - or will not - conform to its rules.'She is a writer of great subtlety and understanding, and this is her best novel since Moon Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 1987' The Scotsman'Evokes an escalating atmosphere of menace . . . Lively at her deceptively easy-to-read best' Daily Mail

A House Unlocked is Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively's classic memoir.The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before.In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life.In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.'Wonderful. Lively is brilliant and original . . . Every page of this book captures your attention' Daily Mail'Remarkable, richly enjoyable . . . a captivating memoir' Helen Dunmore, The Times'Engaging, curious, compelling, remarkable . . . Any time spent with Penelope Lively is a joy' Observer

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 LivelyIn 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?'[A] highly original form of fictional autobiography as well as a fascinating insight into the seemingly random nature of destiny' Daily Mail'[Lively's] writing has always tackled deep questions of identity, memory, love and loss . . . These elegant 'confabulations', as she calls them, allow Lively's talents full range. Intelligent, limpidly well-written and full of human understanding, they evoke the times she has seen and the richness of other lives as well as her own' Sunday Telegraph

'So vividly evocative that you can smell the dust and dung, jacaranda and the oleander. It offers potent glimpses of British colonial life 50 years ago: the snake-charmer in the garden; the nine-year old Penelope spying on de Gaulle at Government House... The result is a wise, colourful and touching tale' The TimesThis poignant, bittersweet autobiography is about growing up in Egypt. Yet it is also an investigation into childhood itself, in which the author uses herself and her memories as an insight into how children see and know. Vividly conveying the sights and sounds of Eygpt up to, and including, World War II, from a lonely little girl's point of view, 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 past.

Published in Penguin Modern Classics, Penelope Lively's Heat Wave is a moving portrayal of a fragile family damaged and defined by adultery, and the lengths to which a mother will go to protect the ones she loves.Pauline is spending the summer at World's End, a cottage somewhere in the middle of England. This year the adjoining cottage is occupied by her daughter Teresa and baby grandson Luke; and, of course, Maurice, the man Teresa married. As the hot months unfold, Maurice grows ever more involved in the book he is writing - and with his female copy editor - and Pauline can only watch in dismay and anger as her daughter repeats her own mistakes in love. The heat and tension will lead to a violent, startling climax. Penelope Lively (b. 1933) was born in Cairo. 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 novels include Passing On, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave, and many are published by Penguin.If you enjoyed Heat Wave, you might like Lively's Moon Tiger, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Extraordinarily good, intelligent and perceptive ... very moving' Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black'[Heat Wave is] short, but the emotions are so intense and the writing so good that it punches well above its weight'Independent

No.40 Norham Gardens, Oxford, is the home of Clare Mayfield, her two aged aunts and two lodgers. The house is a huge Victorian monstrosity, with rooms all full of old furniture, old papers, old clothes, memorabilia - it is like a living museum.Clare discovers in a junk room the vividly painted shield which her great-grandfather, an eminent anthropologist, had brought back from New Guinea. She becomes obsessed with its past and determined to find out more about its strange tribal origins.Dreams begin to haunt her - dreams of another country, another culture, another time, and of shadowy people whom she feels are watching her. Who are they, and what do they want?

No.40 Norham Gardens, Oxford, is the home of Clare Mayfield, her two aged aunts and two lodgers. The house is a huge Victorian monstrosity, with rooms all full of old furniture, old papers, old clothes, memorabilia - it is like a living museum.Clare discovers in a junk room the vividly painted shield which her great-grandfather, an eminent anthropologist, had brought back from New Guinea. She becomes obsessed with its past and determined to find out more about its strange tribal origins.Dreams begin to haunt her - dreams of another country, another culture, another time, and of shadowy people whom she feels are watching her. Who are they, and what do they want?