Synopses & Reviews
A vibrant new novel from 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.
Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people's lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet. Brought to life in her hallmark graceful prose and full of keen insights into human nature, How It All Began is an engaging, contemporary tale that is sure to strike a chord with her legion of loyal fans as well as new readers. A writer of rare wisdom, elegance, and humor, Lively is a consummate storyteller whose gifts are on full display in this masterful work.
Review
Praise for Dancing Fish and Ammonites
“Buoyant and propulsive . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing. . . . Lively communicates ideas and experiences with flashes of narrative color: the tins of water in which the feet of her crib stood in childhood, to spare her from Cairos ants; the layout of a beloved garden; the sight of women in felt hats and gloves as they walked past the bombed-out rubble of wartime Britain.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Lively describes how literature shaped her from the time she was a small girl growing up in Cairo, and gives a deeply thoughtful account of the formative powers of consistent literary engagement. . . . She moves with agility between a wide range of observations on the personal and social consequences of being old, providing her readers with a perspective from ‘an unexpected dimension.”
—The New Yorker
“Funny, smart, and poignant . . . Admirers of Penelope Lively's many fine novels will find the same lucid intelligence at work in her elegantly written ‘view from old age. . . . Memory, history, archaeology, paleontology—for Penelope Lively, they are all part of our individual and collective effort to retrieve lost time. She chronicles her personal engagement in that quest with wit and rue.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Witty, gentle-humored, sharp . . . Throughout Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator. . . . Subjects that may, at first glance, seem random and somewhat scattershot take on the elegant coherence of a deeply satisfying conversation.”
—All Things Considered
“Lively looks out at the world and then back at herself in it, examining everything through the scrim of a prodigious intelligence and a memory that is ‘the mind's triumph over time. . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is chock full of anecdote, opinion, insight, lore and the sheer delight of a life lived fully.”
—Shelf Awareness
“An insightful book of self-reflection from the acclaimed novelist. . . . Every few years since the 1970s, Lively has published a slim, delicious novel, mixing sympathy and satire with a Chekhovian focus on time, mortality, and wasted opportunities. . . . The faithful will recognize the authors love of archaeology, and many will keep a pen handy to record titles and authors, since reading is one activity age has not diminished, and Lively is not shy about musing over her favorites. . . . Although readers will long for her next novel, few will regret that she has taken time off to write this unsentimental, occasionally poignant meditation on a long life.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lively examines the many appealing and noteworthy facets of old age with her expert observers eye and eloquent touch. . . . These reflective essays offer a wealth of riches for further study.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Elegant and thoughtful.”
—Times Magazine (London)
“Livelys memoir about age and the pleasures and pains of seniority is informative, instructive, unexpected, and beautifully observed.”
—Vogue (UK)
“Lively remains alive to the world, as any novelist should be (and, for the record, she still writes very fine novels). . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is powerfully consoling. Lively is certainly sagacious, her words careful and freighted. But there is girlishness here, too. Things still catch her eye, her attention. New books. Old stories. Another day for the taking.”
—The Observer (London)
“As tightly coiled as one of the ammonites of the title . . . Livelys briskness, expressing valuable insight and masking deep feeling, will delight all those who love her novels. . . . What she offers is a series of meditations on memory itself and on what still gives her life purpose: reading and history. Her attitude is rueful but accepting—as it must be. . . . Of course, for most of us, memory starts to fail as we get older, but Dancing Fish and Ammonites is itself a wonderfully optimistic testament to intellectual activity as one way towards, if not eternal youth, then a brightness that defies the encroaching gloom.”
—The Daily Mail
“A readers pure delight . . . It works as a whistle-stop history of the past 80 years from the perspective of one delightful and bookish womans life. . . . Reading it is like listening to a favorite older relative reminisce, if only older relatives were all well-traveled Oxford graduates with keen humor and a sharp knack for observing human behavior.”
—The Independent on Sunday
Review
Praise for Dancing Fish and Ammonites “Buoyant and propulsive . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing. . . . Lively communicates ideas and experiences with flashes of narrative color: the tins of water in which the feet of her crib stood in childhood, to spare her from Cairos ants; the layout of a beloved garden; the sight of women in felt hats and gloves as they walked past the bombed-out rubble of wartime Britain.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Engaging . . . Livelys writing shines brightest when her discursive remarks demonstrate the methods and preoccupations that have shaped her fiction.”
—The New Yorker
“Funny, smart and poignant . . . Admirers of Penelope Lively's many fine novels will find the same lucid intelligence at work in her elegantly written ‘view from old age. . . . Memory, history, archaeology, paleontology—for Penelope Lively, they are all part of our individual and collective effort to retrieve lost time. She chronicles her personal engagement in that quest with wit and rue.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A collection of well-written essays that draw on Livelys past as she reflects on the present. . . . Lively notes the physical challenges of aging as well as the pleasures shes given up; some with relief, others with regret. She also reveals a sly sense of humor. . . . Her lifelong love affair with books is the topic of "Reading and Writing," where she mines the quirks of her own personal reading habits and library (her fiction is kept in the kitchen) and the glorious news for readers that ‘The stimulus of old-age reading is the realization that taste and response do not atrophy: you are always finding yourself enthusiastic about something you had not expected to like.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A gift . . . witty, gentle-humored, sharp . . . Throughout Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator. . . . Subjects that may, at first glance, seem random and somewhat scattershot take on the elegant coherence of a deeply satisfying conversation.”
—All Things Considered
Synopsis
Rare personal reflections from one of our most talented writers (The New York Times Book Review)
Look out for Penelope Lively s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories.
Memory and history have been Penelope Lively s terrain in fiction throughout a career that has spanned five decades. In this funny, smart, and poignant (Los Angeles Times) memoir, she offers a glimpse into her influences and formative years, as well as a view of what life looks like from the vantage point of eighty years. Lively traces the arc of her own life, from early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain s twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archaeology, and on the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey. She also takes an intimate look back at a life devoted to books and writes insightfully about aging."
Synopsis
The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing The memory that we live with . . . is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.”
Memory and history have been Penelope Livelys terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Livelys life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britains twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journeyincluding a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands.
Synopsis
Rare personal reflections from one of our most talented writers” (The New York Times Book Review) Memory and history have been Penelope Livelys terrain in fiction throughout a career that has spanned five decades. In this funny, smart, and poignant” (Los Angeles Times) memoir, she offers a glimpse into her influences and formative years, as well as a view of what life looks like from the vantage point of eighty years. Lively traces the arc of her own life, from early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britains twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archaeology, and on the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey. She also takes an intimate look back at a life devoted to books and writes insightfully about aging.
About the Author
Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.
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 novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave.
Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 program on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.