The mugging of a retired schoolteacher on a London street has unexpected repercussions for her friends and neighbors when it inadvertently reveals an illicit love affair, leads to a business partnership, and helps an immigrant to reinvent his life.

A collection of short fiction by the Booker Prize winner and best-selling author of How It All Began explores themes of history, family and diverse relationships, presenting in the title story the experiences of a Mediterranean purple swamp hen living in Quintus Pompeius' villa who narrowly escapes Vesuvius.

"Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin...

"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...

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.

Book editor Pauline becomes increasingly agitated when it appears that her daughter Teresa's husband Maurice is a philanderer, and disturbed that Teresa's love for Maurice--an echo of the self-destructive love Pauline felt for Teresa's father--is blinding her to the truth.

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house, Golsoncott. Long after the house was sold out of the family, she begins to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, Lively paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change-and of a family that transformed with the times. Charting the course of the domestic...

Newly retired, unmarried and childless, social anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in England's West Country, a region of stolid farmers and bucolic charm, yet finds it difficult to settle in.