LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
I first encountered Lively's cool, elegant prose and masterly dissection of character more than 20 years ago - in The Road to Lichfield - and became instantly addicted. These qualities are still evident in Spiderweb. It is not only Lively who analyses her characters though, so does Stella, pivot of the story, a social anthropologist and bird of passage - 'the invisible observer, the visitor from outer space...', who has spent her life scrutinizing other people in remote communities. Her life has not been entirely emotionally arid. There have been enduring friendships and love-affairs, but she has shied away from commitment and now, in her 60s and abruptly retired, finds herself compelled to take stock - to recollect emotion not in tranquillity but with clarity. If she has lived anywhere permanently it was in the landscape of the mind. Now she needs, at last, to put down roots. Almost by accident she moves to a village in the quintessentially English county of Somerset. Unable to change her habit of discernment, Stella finds there a society as 'complex and opaque' as all others. And the problems of emotional connections don't go away. Review by ELIZABETH GREY (Kirkus UK)
