Ammonites and Leaping Fish

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 024196699X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
A memoir that addresses ageing, memory, time and a life in the 20th century, by one of our greatest writers, Penelope Lively. 'This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise - ambushed, or so it can seem. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here.' In this charming but powerful memoir, Penelope Lively reports from beyond the horizon of old age. She describes what old age feels like for those who have arrived there and considers the implications of this new demographic. She looks at the context of a life and times, the history and archaeology that is actually being made as we live out our lives in real time, in her case World War II; post war penny-pinching Britain; the Suez crisis; the Cold War and up to the present day. She examines the tricks and truths of memory. She looks back over a lifetime of reading and writing. And finally she looks at her identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others. This is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014312627X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
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.

Ammonites and Leaping Fish

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9781405966993
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Oleander, Jacaranda

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060926228
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
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.

The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Author: Murasaki Shikibu
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141907657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973-c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace - the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga. The Diary is also a work of great subtlety and intense personal reflection, as Murasaki makes penetrating insights into human psychology - her pragmatic observations always balanced by an exquisite and pensive melancholy.

Moon Tiger

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 080219737X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
“A powerful, moving and beautifully wrought novel about the ways in which lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past.” —The Boston Globe Winner of the Man Booker Prize Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she’s carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt. Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia’s personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia’s impact on their world. “Emotionally, Moon Tiger is kaleidoscopic, deeply satisfying. The all too brief encounter between Claudia and Tom will surely rate as one of the most memorable of contemporary fictional affairs. This is one of the best novels I have read for years.” —The London Sunday Telegraph “It pulls us in; it engages us and saddens us. It is also unexpectedly funny . . . It leaves its traces in the air long after you’ve put it away.” —The New York Times Book Review “One of the very best Booker winners . . . it asks hard questions about memory and history and personal legacy; it’s stylistically demanding and inventive . . . a wonderful book.” —The Guardian

The Library Fish

Author: Alyssa Satin Capucilli
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1534477063
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
In this sweet and adventurous picture book, an unusually literary fish leaves the safety of her bowl to explore her library home for the first time. When Mr. Hughes finds a fish all alone in the library and names her Library Fish, she knows she’s found her true home. Library Fish makes friends in the library and on the bookmobile, checks that books are returned, and absolutely loves story time, when she can listen to all kinds of stories and poems, meet unforgettable characters, and travel around the world and even to other planets! But one day, everything outside is covered in snow and no one comes to the library. Will Library Fish be brave enough to venture outside her fishbowl for the very first time and explore the library she calls home?

The Little Friend

Author: Donna Tartt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030787348X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670016556
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"First published in Great Britain as Ammonites and Leaping fish by Fig Tree"--Title page verso.

Tom's Midnight Garden

Author: Philippa Pearce
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192717771
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
"Tom is not prepared for what is about to happen when he hears the grandfather clock strike thirteen. Outside the back door is a garden, which everyone tells him does not exist."--Page 4 de la couverture.