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Penelope Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son, three granddaughters and three grandsons, and lives in London. She has written many prize-winning novels and collections of short stories for both adults and children. Moon Tiger won the 1987 Booker Prize. Penelope Lively's most recent book, Making It Up, is available now in Penguin paperback.
Though Lively (Moon Tiger; Perfect Happiness) can be satirical, even wicked, these 36 stories (two earlier collections from England plus assorted recent stories, some published in US magazines) are mostly gentle, affectionate portraits of English men and women who muddle through. While there's a host of types and situations here, most center on village streets, petty bourgeoisie society, and academia. In truth, when a character in Venice, Now and Then says that Things are so inconstant. That's the trouble, she could be speaking for most of her fictional cohorts: an aging English lady with insomnia ( The Voice of God in Adelaide Terrace ); a befuddled housewife whose treasure of a maid turns out to be a domineering sneak-thief ( Help ); and a professor suffering through the small humiliations of academia ( Revenant as Typewriter ), among many others. In addition to Help, other notables include: Nothing Missing but the Samovar, about a German Anglophile who spends a touching season with a sympathetically drawn family of shabbygenteel aristocrats at the end of their economic tether; Corruption, a delicately textured portrait involving an aging judge, his wife, a female interloper, and a box of confiscated pornography; The Pill Box, very short and a little metafictional ( How, having glimpsed the possibility of the impossible, can the world remain as steady as you had supposed? ); and The Dream Merchant, a whimsical portrait of a sensible man who sells dreams from 9:30-5:00 but doesn't believe in them: that was the secret of his success. Occasionally cloying or thin, but mostly solid work, full of character, incident, and elegiac charm. (Kirkus Reviews)
