10/04/19: Penelope Lively – Heat Wave (1996)

Middled-aged copy-editor Pauline was once cheated on by her husband. She now sees the same thing happening to her daughter.

This is a clever novel that weaves together a mother/and-daughter story, a saga of past and present relationships and a study of rural vs. urban living. It’s set in the English countryside and the nature around the characters is vividly brought into being as a metaphorical mirror of what is happening to them.

It's such a slow-burner that I was surprised when it concluded in a moment of sudden action, albeit a satisfying one.

20/05/16: Penelope Lively – According to Mark (1984)

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, According to Mark follows writer Mark Lamming as he tries to research a literary biography. His research into the unsung author Gilbert Strong gets him involved with Strong's granddaughter, who runs a garden centre in Dorset, sparking off a series of events that culminate in a road trip through France.

This is another hugely intelligent, entertaining Penelope Lively novel. It's funny in places and contains gems of social observation. Particularly well drawn characters – such as Mark's controlling and super-controlled wife Diana – make this a real pleasure to read. Lively flits between perspectives, sometimes approaching a scene from an unexpected point of view and sometimes revisiting the same events to give another person's take on them. This is unusual and refreshing: so much fiction takes a more static line on whose perspective a book is from. She makes it work very freely and accessibly.

The book asks some deep questions about identity. It can also be read as a straightforward novel about human relationships. I came to this soon after the more serious Booker-winning Moon Tiger and was not disappointed.

28/03/16: Penelope Lively – Moon Tiger (1987)

What a great novel. Claudia Hampton, now a 76-year-old woman, lays dying in her hospital bed. She recalls episodes of her history (sometimes dovetailing with world history) and the people she shared it with – her daughter, her brother, her partner and the true love of her life, killed in action in World War II. As fragments of memory drift in and out of focus, the story of her life emerges in patchwork form. It's a very satisfying approach. Although the perceptions are fundamentally Claudia's, the author also allows us inside the minds of the other characters for a more multilayered texture. There's a huge intelligence to the writing and it's a joy to read something of this quality and richness. One of the most enjoyable of the Booker Prize novels (it won in 1987), this is a book that stays with you.