Complete works
Penelope Lively
(Penguin Classics)

It was my wife who persuaded me to read Penelope Lively. Why had I not done so before? First, I suspect, I still thought of her as primarily a children’s author, a path she did indeed take (winning the Carnegie Medal along the way) before her first novel for adults was published in 1977. Second, maybe I thought I was sated with Penelopes, having read most of the novels by an earlier Oxonian, the late Penelope Fitzgerald. Perhaps if Lively had been called Helen, as she wanted to be as a child immersed in tales of the Homeric world, I would have come to her earlier.