A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner.
"Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings. In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius's villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. "Abroad" captures the low point of an artist couple's tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery, and even retribution--as in "The Third Wife," when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap. Each of these delightful stories is elevated by Lively's signature graceful prose and eye for the subtle yet powerfully evocative detail. Wry, charming, and keenly insightful, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
"The stories are compact yet often novelistic in scope, deftly alighting on the seemingly trivial moments that determine the direction of relationships and lives."
--The New Yorker
'No language passed but perfect understanding . . .'
In Penelope Lively's fifth collection of short stories this celebrated author roams far and wide in fifteen tales that are subtle, smart, scary, funny and full of secrets. Among others we meet the purple swamp hen preserved in a Roman fresco and learn of the slave girl to whom it shares a connection beyond words; the old lady who surprises the life out of her carer during a trip to the shops; the ex-wife who, twenty-five years after her marriage broke up, discovers exactly why it went so wrong.
'You are in the hands of a master' Daily Mail
'Thoughtful, intelligent and light of touch. Lively has the gift, rare and wonderful, of being able to peel back the layers one by one and set them before us, translucent and gleaming' Sunday Telegraph
'Spry and world-wise' Observer
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