Penelope Lively

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination… A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award, A Stitch in Time is republished in the Collins Modern Classics range. Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to...

Life in the Garden is a memoir of the author's life in gardens and an exploration of gardens in literature. Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens—the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset...

First time in Modern Classics Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work—a history of the world ... and in the process, my own. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There...

'A mischievous boy hero and an equally amusing ghoul,’ Guardian An iconic ghost story for children from Penelope Lively, one of the modern greats of British fiction. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there… James is fed up. His family has moved to a new cottage – with grounds that are great for excavations, and trees...

A stylish reissue of the Booker Prize-winning, Golden Booker Prize-shortlisted classic—now with a new introduction by Elif Shafak. Claudia Hampton—beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world... and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First...

Now with a new chapter, On Being Ninety—a memoir of ageing, memory, and time, written by one of the twentieth century's greatest writers at the age of eighty. 'The twentieth century shook the world—it sobers me to have been one of those to see it through.' In this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', Penelope Lively, at eighty, reports...

A rediscovered children's classic, winner of the 1976 Whitbread Award, from the Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal-winning author of Moon Tiger and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to hear things that aren’t there –...

A gorgeous novel by the Booker-winning author, now a Penguin Essential. Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many years earlier, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn's work as a historian should have inured him to unexpected findings and reversals,...

An exquisite selection of the best short stories from one of our best-loved writers. Wry, compassionate, and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively's stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate stories of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled...

A new collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-winning writer. A dream house that is hiding something sinister; two women having lunch who share a husband; an old woman doing her weekly supermarket shop with a secret past that no one could guess; a couple who don't know each other at all even after fifteen years together; and,...

The Road to Lichfield, the Booker Prize shortlisted first novel by Penelope Lively, is now available for the first time as a Penguin Essential. Ann Linton leaves her family in Berkshire and sets up camp in her father's house when he is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield. As she shares his last weeks, she meets David Fielding,...