Penelope Lively is een auteur van talrijke veelgeprezen romans en korte verhalenbundels die lezers van alle leeftijden aanspreken. Haar werk verkent regelmatig thema's als herinnering, tijd en de ingewikkelde manieren waarop het verleden het heden vormt. Lively duikt in de complexiteit van menselijke relaties en het innerlijke leven van haar personages met scherpe inzichten. Haar proza wordt geprezen om zijn elegantie, beknoptheid en het vermogen om diepe emotionele reacties op te roepen.
This anthology of new writing promotes contemporary literature of the English language from Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth. It contains new names among older, recognizable names and includes short stories, poems, novels in progress and short fiction.
Clare's grandfather brought back a shield from New Guinea seventy years ago, and now Clare's dreams are haunted by images of New Guinea. It is up to her to lay the ghost of an encounter between a Victorian anthropologist and a Stone Age New Guinea tribe to rest. First published in 1974.
Frances, happily married for many years, and suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steve has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. This title illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth- century - death and grief.
Wry, compassionate and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively's stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate tales of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and how small acts ripple through the generations. With two new never-before-published stories alongside treasures from her early writing days, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master.
This glimmering collection of new short fiction from a Booker Prize winner showcases a unique blend of sympathy, emotional wisdom, and satiric wit. The author, known for acclaimed novels like The Photograph and Family Album, captivates readers with themes of history, family, and relationships set in vividly rendered environments. In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen reveals the secrets of Quintus Pompeius's villa, highlighting his narrow escape from Vesuvius's eruption. "Abroad" depicts a low point for an artist couple on a tumultuous European road trip, forced to paint a mural in a remote Spanish farmhouse while repairing their broken-down car. Other tales explore friends and lovers in pivotal moments of indiscretion and discovery, such as in "The Third Wife," where a woman uncovers her husband's con artist ways and turns a house-hunting trip into a revenge scheme. Each story is enhanced by the author's graceful prose and keen eye for evocative detail. Wry, charming, and insightful, this collection is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers.
A seventeenth-century sorcerer emerges in an old house as a poltergeist and targets James as his apprentice.
Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the centre of her life, Tom, her one great love both found and lost in the "mad fairyland" of war-torn Egypt.
In 1900 Lady Anna Winterbourne travels to Egypt where she falls in love with Sharif, and Egyptian Nationalist utterly committed to his country's cause. A hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee and a descendant of Anna and Sharif, goes to Egypt, taking with her an old family trunk, inside which are found notebooks and journals which reveal Anna and Sharif's secret.
'Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived' Daily Telegraph 'Clever and poignant . . . there is much to enjoy. This is Lively at her best' Sunday ExpressIn this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', Penelope Lively, at eighty, reports back on what she finds. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she's been - fragments of memories from a life well lived.'A superb study of memory and of her own voyage into the ninth decade of her life. Lively is a compelling, vitally interested witness to time past' Helen Dunmore, Observer, Books of the Year'Enthralling. Will delight all those who love Lively's novels' Daily Mail
