Authors: Penelope Lively
ISBN-13: 9781616790554, ISBN-10: 1616790555
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Date Published: September 2006
Edition: Bargain
Beloved memoirist (A House Unlocked), children's book author (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe), and Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively is perhaps best known for smart, literate thrillers that look to the past for keys to understanding, like 2003's The Photograph. "I'm not an historian," Lively told Britain's The Observer, "but I can get interested -- obsessively interested -- with any aspect of the past."
Hailed by critics as a benchmark in a career full of award-winning achievements, Making It Up is Penelope Lively's answer to the oft-asked question, "How much of what you write comes from your own life?" What if Lively hadn't escaped from Egypt, her birthplace, at the outbreak of World War II? What would her life have been like if she'd married someone else? From a hillside in Italy to an archaeological dig, the author explores the stories that could have been hers, fashioning a sublime dance between reality and imagination that confirms her reputation as a singular talent.
Who knows what determines the course of a life? Genes, character, chance? There are many means of exploring these questions, but one of the most tantalizing is Penelope Lively's "confabulation."
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Preface | 1 | |
Mozambique Channel | 3 | |
The Albert Hall | 45 | |
The Temple of Mithras | 72 | |
Imjin River | 112 | |
Transatlantic | 134 | |
Comet | 164 | |
Number Twelve Sheep Street | 205 | |
Penelope | 232 |