Synopses & Reviews
In A House Unlocked, Whitbread Award- and Booker Prize-winning Penelope Lively takes us on a journey of her familial country house in England that her grandparents bought in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change -- and of the family that changed with the times. As she charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through portraits of the refugees who came to live with them. A fascinating, intimate social history of its times, A House Unlocked is an eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and above all a tribute to the meaning of home.
Review
"Of course a writer, a good one, can make one thing bear witness to another, can make the personal universal
.Any time spent with Penelope Lively is a joy" The Observer
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"A curious book full of curios: her grandmothers embroidered fire screen, a bon bon box, knife rests, a Bluther grand piano. Each is an inspiration...This book helps define one of our leading novelists." Brian Martin, The Financial Times
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"Lively unlocks more than the house and its century; the author herself is here, a product of both her corseted grandmother and the more modern eras that followed. This is a quietly intelligent, oddly soothing meditation on modernity." Publishers Weekly
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"Many of Penelope Lively's fine novels, stories, and children's books, notably Moon Tiger (1987) and A Stitch in Time (1976), have dealt in one way or another with the subtle but tenacious links between historical forces and personal memory. Now, with A House Unlocked, she presents herself and her family as direct participants, albeit frequently passive and unconscious ones, in the feverish drama of the twentieth century....A House Unlocked is a very personal book, and the personality that shines through is an attractive one: diffident, thoughtful, gentle." Brooke Allen, Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Review
"Lively's crisp and savvy fiction is intimately tied to place, an orientation she uses with exceptional vision in this fine weave of family and world history....Lively not only uses "the private life of a house . . . to bear witness to the public traumas" of the twentieth century but she also offers incisive, witty, and unfailingly sensitive observations about change and stasis in women's lives." Donna Seaman, Booklist
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"In this elegiac yet resolutely unsentimental book, the house becomes a Rosetta stone for the authors familial memories and an unwitting index of social change....A House Unlocked might have the well-mannered surface of a Merchant-Ivory film, but beneath the decorous prose is a clear-eyed refusal to indulge in nostalgia." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"The central theme is the breakdown of formality and of the rigid polarities between town and country, parents and children, insolent wealth and abysmal poverty....Lively revels in the silent eloquence of the physical world....and she ushers along these delicate filaments, sometimes to softly glowing insights." Heller McAlpin, The San Francisco Chronicle
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"In Livelys scheme, the house is a living organism, wise and alert....What Lively offers at her best in A House Unlocked [is] vivid acts of deconstruction and construction, representing whole worlds lost but for the survival of such objects and the intelligence essential to their decoding....The result reveals a world and love not well lost." Robert Hosmer, The Chicago Tribune
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"In this slim, beguiling book, Lively describes the contents and customs of the house....By meticulously tracing the provenance of these objects [in the house], she re-creates the life they once furnished." The New Yorker
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"Not only a wonderful description of rooms and objects full of memories, but also a moving account of the refugees from the Holocaust who lived with the family during that dark era." Lee Milazzo, The Dallas Morning News
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"A memoir from novelist Lively in which the personal opens onto the greater social vista with the help of grace and a gimlet eye, as nearly an entire century reverberates inside an English country house....As Lively shapes the greater social picture, she keeps it invested with a personal stake, making her world a deeply lived experience." Kirkus Reviews
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"A fascinating social history covering the effects of the 20th century on Golsoncott, a Somerset country house, it is also undeniably a love story....An infallible guide to whats changed in England and what hasnt, clearly defining its culture and society." Colleen Quinn, Bookreporter.com
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"[A] beautifully written personal account." Booknews
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"Resonant...In returning to a landscape now almost effaced by time and change, she is seeking truths not merely personal but universal...Deeply pleasant, rather as a tea on the lawn and a walk through beautiful countryside." Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 225).