Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively has turned her considerable literary talent to non-fiction with A House Unlocked, a marvellous, meandering collection of memories inspired by Golsoncott, the Somerset country home occupied by her family for the greater part of the last century. By walking around the rooms of the house (in her mind) and looking at fondly remembered objects and furniture, she recalls the events, customs and people that together paint a slowly shifting picture of English country life in the 20th century. It is at once personal and social—a diary of the house and its occupants, and a memoir of the historical landscape.While seemingly remote tragedies such as the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the Blitz all leave their mark, closer to home the house bears witness to important changes in the domestic and social nature of the surrounding countryside and its residents. Lively's memoirs are eclectic and fascinating, whether exploring changing fashions in dress, leisure pursuits, household management and gardening, or looking at the wider implications of changes in attitudes towards social class, women's role and marriage. While photograph albums chart the pictorial history of the family, a weathered picnic rug acts as a prompt for a wider discussion on the early hiking habits of the Romantic poets in that part of the Somerset countryside, the rise in popularity of rambling generally and the advent of the Great Western Railway and with it the opening up of the West Country as a hot tourist destination.Throughout this rich and varied book, written in her inimitable, considered style, what Penelope Lively seeks to show is that, while many of the customs, fashions and attitudes of 20th-century middle-England have changed forever, many remain, buried just beneath a thin coating of modernism... and some changes are so seismic that they are almost overlooked in the rush to honour our past

A retelling of the adventures of a nosy, naughty, and sassy little girl who finds the house of the three bears and helps herself to their belongings.

At age sixty-five, retired anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in Somerset, England, and slowly acquires neighbors, a dog, and a professional curiosity about the country village where she intends to settle and put down roots for the first time. The drama of life in the West Country alternates with Stella's powerfully vivid memories of lovers, friends, and her anthropological sojourns in such exotic places as the Nile Valley in Egypt, the island of Malta, and among farmers in the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. She has spent her life studying communities of people - their families, social structures, how they welcomed outsiders into their midst - remaining an observer, privileged to share in their intimate life but not obliged, and finally unwilling, to tie herself closely to any lover, friend, or social group. In Somerset, Stella once again finds an opportunity to become part of the web of relationships that make for human society. Her oldest friend's husband, now widowed, is interested in something more than friendship with her. Her neighbors turn out to be a dangerously violent and unstable family, a threat to the entire community as well as to Stella herself. An old friend, an archaeologist, poignantly seeks her out for companionship. How will independent-minded Stella, always reluctant to make an emotional commitment, respond?

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.

A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author's unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planets of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. 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 childhood.

A cat and a crow have their own individual styles of telling stories and one day these styles are displayed as the two share an exciting adventure.

Tough and sexy New York police detective Nikki Heat leads the investigation into the death of a New York real estate tycoon who plunged to his death on a Manhattan sidewalk. She's hit with an unexpected challenge when the commissioner assigns superstar magazine journalist Jameson Rook to ride along with her to research an article on New York's Finest.

A paleontologist and a magazine journalist are forced to land in the imaginary country of Callimbia, while the British passengers of Capricorn Flight 500 are at the mercy of a capricious new ruler in this violencetorn country.