A House Unlocked - Softcover

Lively, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802140076 ISBN 13: 9780802140074

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003

Synopsis

In A House Unlocked, Whitbread Award- and Booker Prize-winning Penelope Lively takes us on a journey of her familial country house in England that her grandparents bought in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change -- and of the family that changed with the times. As she charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through portraits of the refugees who came to live with them. A fascinating, intimate social history of its times, A House Unlocked is an eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and above all a tribute to the meaning of home.

About this title

Review

"Lively's one great subject...concerns the wages of time and the persistence of the past... In this elegiac yet resolutely unsentimental book, the house becomes a Rosetta stone for the author's familial memories and an unwitting index of social change... A House Unlocked is a free-associative excursion into the past."

"[A House Unlocked] possesses far more depth than most other books two or three times its length.... [Lively's] comments on what she imagines and recalls invariably are interesting and perceptive; in one instance, they are also unexpcetedly moving."

"Lively writes the sort of graceful, unobtrusive English that is rare these days....A House Unlocked is a very personal book, and the personality that shines through is an attractive one: diffident, thoughtful, gentle."

"In this beguiling book, Lively describes the contents and customs of the house....By meticulously tracing the provenance of these objects [in the house], she re-creates the life they once furnished."

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802140076
• ISBN 13: 9780802140074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240