A House Unlocked - Softcover

Lively, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014100164X ISBN 13: 9780141001647

Publisher: Penguin, 2002

Synopsis

A House Unlocked is Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively's classic memoir.

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before.

In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life.

In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.

'Wonderful. Lively is brilliant and original . . . Every page of this book captures your attention' Daily Mail

'Remarkable, richly enjoyable . . . a captivating memoir' Helen Dunmore, The Times

'Engaging, curious, compelling, remarkable . . . Any time spent with Penelope Lively is a joy' Observer

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.

About this title

Review:

Penelope Lively has turned her considerable literary talent to non-fiction with A House Unlocked, a marvellous, meandering collection of memories inspired by Golsoncott, the Somerset country home occupied by her family for the greater part of the last century. By walking around the rooms of the house (in her mind) and looking at fondly remembered objects and furniture, she recalls the events, customs and people that together paint a slowly shifting picture of English country life in the 20th century. It is at once personal and social--a diary of the house and its occupants, and a memoir of the historical landscape.

While seemingly remote tragedies such as the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the Blitz all leave their mark, closer to home the house bears witness to important changes in the domestic and social nature of the surrounding countryside and its residents. Lively's memoirs are eclectic and fascinating, whether exploring changing fashions in dress, leisure pursuits, household management and gardening, or looking at the wider implications of changes in attitudes towards social class, women's role and marriage. While photograph albums chart the pictorial history of the family, a weathered picnic rug acts as a prompt for a wider discussion on the early hiking habits of the Romantic poets in that part of the Somerset countryside, the rise in popularity of rambling generally and the advent of the Great Western Railway and with it the opening up of the West Country as a hot tourist destination.

Throughout this rich and varied book, written in her inimitable, considered style, what Penelope Lively seeks to show is that, while many of the customs, fashions and attitudes of 20th-century middle-England have changed forever, many remain, buried just beneath a thin coating of modernism... and some changes are so seismic that they are almost overlooked in the rush to honour our past. --Carey Green

Review:

Wonderful. Lively is brilliant and original . . . Every page of this book captures your attention (Daily Mail)

Remarkable, richly enjoyable ... a captivating memoir (Helen Dunmore The Times)

Engaging, curious, compelling, remarkable ... Any time spent with Penelope Lively is a joy (Observer)

An ingenious memoir. The enchantment lies in its personal narrative: the portrait of a family and its progress through the twentieth century (Literary Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 014100164X
• ISBN 13: 9780141001647
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240