SALE ON NOW! PROMOTIONS
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize- once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
Farmleigh Creative Study Centre, formerly a grand English manor but by 1974 all but run down, is nonetheless still family-owned: the heir now is minor-artist/huckster Toby Standish. And what Toby Standish has worked out to keep Farmleigh going is a plan by which ordinary people - housewives, secretaries, retired doctors and the like - pay to spend a week and be allowed to work with and/or gaze upon creative folk: e.g., soft-sculptor Paula, American poet Greg, bear-like potter Bob. . . and Jason, love-child of Toby and Paula. The above-mentioned artists (excepting Jason, the only untainted human in the bunch) are spectacular twits and frauds, of course. So Lively (Treasures of Time, Judgement Day) has fierce, Waugh-like fun with their pretensions and poses, their complete lack of ethics, and the feelings of unworthiness they inspire in their paying students. Couplings, artistic sham, venality, and a sort of armored selfishness rule the day; Toby, throughout the book, is constantly on the phone, trying desperately to unload Farmleigh to the highest bidder - multinational corporation or Saudi, no matter. But inevitably, at the end of the week, the suckers wise up - as Lively brings this dry, neat, economically witty skewering of pseudo-bohemianism to a satisfying, frequently delicious close. (Kirkus Reviews)
