A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author's unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planets of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. Lively's memoir offers us the rare opportunity to accompany a gifted writer on a journey of exploration into the mysterious world of her own childhood.

"Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived" -- Daily Telegraph (London) Rare personal reflections from “one of our most talented writers” (The New York Times Book Review), Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively At age eighty, Penelope Lively wrote this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', reporting back on what she found. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she's been - fragments of memories from a life well lived.

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.

The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Wry, compassionate, and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively's stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate stories of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and small acts ripple through the generations. From new and never-before-published stories to forgotten treasures, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master.

Responding to the demands of the Framework for Teaching English, Years 7-9, within the context of the revised National Curriculum, the Level Best series offers a carefully structured and motivating approach to English for Key Stage 3.

A memoir that addresses ageing, memory, time and a life in the 20th century, by one of our greatest writers, Penelope Lively. 'This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise - ambushed, or so it can seem. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here.' In this charming but powerful memoir, Penelope Lively reports from beyond the horizon of old age. She describes what old age feels like for those who have arrived there and considers the implications of this new demographic. She looks at the context of a life and times, the history and archaeology that is actually being made as we live out our lives in real time, in her case World War II; post war penny-pinching Britain; the Suez crisis; the Cold War and up to the present day. She examines the tricks and truths of memory. She looks back over a lifetime of reading and writing. And finally she looks at her identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others. This is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

Penelope Lively is one of England's greatest living writers. In City of the Mind, Matthew Halland is an architect intimately involved with the new face of London, while haunted by the destruction and loss in its history. Matthew has a rich and moving relationship with his daughter Jane, and becomes entangled with an array of fascinating characters, from Rutter, a corrupt real estate developer whose Mafia-like ways disgust him, to Sarah, a romantic ray of hope who enters his life. In Lively's most ambitious novel, she has created a wonderfully rich and audacious confrontation with the mystery of London.

An acclaimed international bestseller, The Perfume Garden is a sensuously written story of lost love, family secrets—and the art of creating a perfect scent. High in the hills of Valencia, a forgotten house guards its secrets. Untouched since Franco's forces tore through Spain in 1936, the whitewashed walls have crumbled, and the garden, laden with orange blossom, grows wild. Emma Temple is the first to unlock its doors in seventy years. Emma is London's leading perfumier, but her blessed life has taken a difficult turn. Her free-spirited mother, Liberty, who taught her the art of fragrance making, has just passed away. At the same time, she broke up with her long-time lover and business partner, Joe, whose baby she happens to be carrying. While Joe is in New York trying to sell his majority share in their company, Emma, guided by a series of letters and a key bequeathed to her in Liberty's will, decides to leave her job and travel to Valencia, where she will give birth in the house her mother mysteriously purchased just before her death. The villa is a perfect retreat: redolent with the exotic scents of orange blossom and neroli, dappled with light and with the rich colors of a forgotten time. Emma makes it her mission to restore the place to its former glory. But for her aging grandmother, Freya, a British nurse who stayed in Valencia during Spain's devastating civil war, Emma's new home evokes memories of a terrible secret, a part of her family's past that until now has managed to stay hidden. With two beautifully interwoven narratives and a lush, atmospheric setting, Kate Lord Brown's The Perfume Garden is a dramatic, emotional debut that readers won't soon forget.

Paradise is commonly imagined as a place of departure or arrival, beginning and closure, permanent inhabitation of which, however much desired, is illusory. This makes it the dream of the traveller, the explorer, the migrant – hence, a trope recurrent in postcolonial writing, which is so centrally concerned with questions of displacement and belonging. Projections of Paradise documents this concern and demonstrates the indebtedness of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Cyril Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, James Goonewardene, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Janette Turner Hospital, Penelope Lively, Fatima Mernissi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, M.G. Vassanji, and Rudy Wiebe to strikingly similar myths of fulfilment. In writing, directly or indirectly, about the experience of migration, all project paradises as places of origin or destination, as homes left or not yet found, as objects of nostalgic recollection or hopeful anticipation. Yet in locating such places, quite specifically, in Egypt, Zanzibar, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Sundarbans, Canada, the Caribbean, Queensland, Morocco, Tuscany, Russia, the Arctic, the USA, and England, they also subvert received fantasies of paradise as a pleasurable land rich with natural beauty. Projections of Paradise explores what happens to these fantasies and what remains of them as postcolonial writings call them into question and expose the often hellish realities from which popular dreams of ideal elsewheres are commonly meant to provide an escape. Contributors: Vera Alexander, Gerd Bayer, Derek Coyle, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Ursula Kluwick, Janne Korkka, Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz, Sofia Muñoz-Valdieso, Susanne Pichler, Helga Ramsey-Kurz, Ulla Ratheiser, Petra Tournay-Thedotou.