Penelope Lively

CLÁSICOS ADAPTADOS AX.ALM.LECTURAS GENERAL

¿Fue antes la escritora o el jardín? Penelope Lively se embarca en un fascinante viaje a través de los jardines que han marcado su vida. Desde el gran jardín de la casa en la que se crio, en El Cairo, hasta el que tenia su abuela en los inclinados campos de Somerset, pasando por la exuberante floresta de El paraiso perdido de Milton y los coloridos laberintos de Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas, asi como los jardines de escritores, como Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen o Philip Larkin. Literatura, mujer y naturaleza. Un embriagador recorrido que nos lleva de vuelta al hogar primigenio de la humanidad.A medio camino entre autobiografia, reflexion filosofica y cadena de digresiones, esta maravillosa recopilacion de jardines eleva a Penelope Lively a la cumbre de la narrativa contemporanea.

A los setenta y seis años, Claudia Hampton, una historiadora heterodoxa que ha escrito algunos libros de gran éxito de público, está muriéndose en un hospital londinense. En la neblina de su conciencia destellan aun ciertos recuerdos de su vida, aunque ella imagina que esta escribiendo una historia del mundo. Sin embargo, A los setenta y seis años, Claudia Hampton, una historiadora heterodoxa que ha escrito algunos libros de gran éxito de público, está muriéndose en un hospital londinense. En la neblina de su conciencia destellan aun ciertos recuerdos de su vida, aunque ella imagina que esta escribiendo una historia del mundo. Sin embargo, Moon Tiger, novela con la que Penelope Lively consiguio el premio Booker en 1987, no es otra cosa que la historia de la propia Claudia; la vida de una mujer fuerte y autonoma cuyas relaciones con la familia y los amigos han sido muchas veces dificiles.Conforme avanza la novela, va recreando el complejo mosaico de su vida y su epoca y recordando a las personas mas importantes de su vida: Gordon, su hermano y su mejor amigo; Jasper, amante tan encantador como indigno de confianza y padre de Lisa, hija unica de Claudia, una mujer fria y convencional; y Tom, jefe de artilleria a quien Claudia conoce durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial en Egipto, donde ella es corresponsal de prensa...

A respected literary biographer, Mark is working on the life of Gilbert Strong - a writer about whom he thinks he knows everything Happily married, and apparently dedicated to a life of letters, he nevertheless falls in love with Strong's granddaughter Carrie, a vague and unsophisticated young woman more interested in bedding plants than books or passion...

Mark Lamming tiene una vida perfecta. Afamado escritor de biografías literarias, está felizmente casado con Diana, una galerista de arte. Ahora investiga la vida de Gilbert Strong, escritor, ensayista y dramaturgo, y sus pesquisas le llevan hasta Dean Close, antiguo hogar del autor. Carrie, la nieta de Strong, ha reconvertido la casa en un centro de jardineria, y cuando Mark empieza a visitarla con mas frecuencia de la necesaria, se da cuenta de que tal vez no sea solo su libro lo que le interese. A pesar de que Carrie es una joven naif, despreocupada y alejada del mundo literario, Mark se siente cada vez mas atraido por ella. Mezclando sentimientos con trabajo, decide invitarla a viajar por Francia con el fin de entrevistar a su madre, hija de Strong, en busca de una certeza que tal vez este mas alla de la literatura. Penelope Lively (autora de Vida en el jardin), nos muestra su perfil mas apasionante en El mundo segun Mark (finalista del Booker Prize en 1984), un clasico sobre el amor y el deseo, donde literatura, naturaleza y viaje conforman un triptico magistral.

Glyn Peters, un prestigioso historiador del paisaje, encuentra por casualidad una vieja fotografía en la que aparece su mujer, Kath, fallecida quince años antes, cogida de la mano con otro hombre. El hallazgo le impulsara a indagar en la vida de su mujer con la saña del marido humillado y la meticulosidad del arqueologo. El descubrimiento de la fotografia tambien afectara, de una forma u otra, a otras cuatro personas muy cercanas a Kath, que llegaran a conocer un pasado que ni siquiera habian sospechado.JULIAN BARNES ha dicho de PENELOPE LIVELY: Los cuatro ultimos libros de Penelope Lively son cuatro de las mejores novelas inglesas publicadas despues de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Yo le habria dado el premio Booker en las cuatro ocasiones.

In 1935, privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life. Falling for a penniless and bohemian artist, Matt, she abandons her stuffy Kensington existence in London and moves to a rustic cottage in Somerset. A baby, Molly, is born, but the coming war takes Matt - and Lorna's dreams - away... Lorna's decisions and their unforeseeable consequences come to shape the stories first of her daughter, Molly, and then her granddaughter, Ruth. Consequences tells of three generations of women in their own twentieth-century times united by their shared experiences of love, pain, fate and happiness...

Penelope Lively''s Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire, published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a ''history of the world...and in the process, my own''. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia''s life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. "Leaves its traces in the air long after you''ve put it away." (Anne Tyler). "A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes." (Daily Telegraph). "Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished." (Literary Review).

Pauline is spending the summer at World's End, a cottage somewhere in the middle of England This year the adjoining cottage is occupied by her daughter Teresa and baby grandson Luke; and, of course,

Penelope Lively's Treasures of Time was published in 1979, and is an acutely observed study of marriage and manipulation. When the BBC want to make a documentary about acclaimed archaeologist Hugh Paxton, his widow Laura, daughter Kate and her fiance Tom are a little nervous: digging up the past can also disturb the present

'Rich and unusual, a book to treasure. Few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth. Moves between Lively's own horticultural life and a broad history of gardening' Observer 'Wonderful. A manifesto of horticultural delight' Literary Review 'Beautiful. Perfect for literary garden lovers' Good Housekeeping 'Exquisite and original' Daily Telegraph 'Enchanting. Reading this book is like walking with a wise, humorous guide through a series of garden rooms . . . and finding that vistas suddenly open out, on to history, fashion, politics, reflections on time and the taming of nature' Tablet 'A perfect bedside book. In part it's a memoir of the gardens in Lively's life, starting with the exotic Egyptian garden of her childhood and continuing up to her small present-day garden in a north London square' Sunday Express 'A gentle survey of the garden's place in Western culture, which morphs into a personal meditation on time, memory and a life well lived' i 'Scholarly bedtime reading' The Times, Books of the Year

'Lively remains a sublime storyteller' Guardian on How It All Began 'More stylish than many writers half her age ...Lively knows a thing of two about storytelling.' The Times on How It All Began A dream house that is hiding something sinister; two women having lunch who share a husband; an old woman doing her weekly supermarket shop with a secret past that no one could guess; a couple who don't know each other at all even after fifteen years together; and, in the story from which this collection takes its name, a bird and a servant girl in ancient Pompeii who cannot converse, but share a perfect understanding. In this new and varied collection of short stories, Penelope Lively shows that she remains a master of her craft, and one of our finest English writers.

Stella Brentwood has led an exotic life for a woman of her time. Her best friend at Oxford, Nadine, knew early what she wanted: marriage and children. Stella, too, has had her share of passion, but her work as an anthropologist - always the outsider, the observer, was her priority. Now she has decided to root herself in Somerset landscape.

Ann Linton leaves her family in Berkshire and sets up camp in her fathers house when he is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield. As she shares his last weeks she meets David Fielding, and the love they share brings her feelings into sharp focus.

Allersmead is a big shabby Victorian suburban house. The perfect place to grow up for elegant Sandra, difficult Gina, destructive Paul, considerate Katie, clever Roger and flighty Clare.But was it?As adults, the children return to Allersmead one by one. To their home-making mother and aloof writer father, and a house that for years has played silent witness to a family''s secrets. And one devastating secret of which no one speaks . . .

¿Fue antes la escritora o el jardín? Penelope Lively, una de las autoras británicas más celebradas del momento, abandona su papel de novelista y aborda en este delicioso libro su pasión por el arte, la literatura y la jardineria en un recorrido que la llevara en busca de los jardines (reales y literarios) que han marcado su vida: desde los patios de su casa de infancia en El Cairo hasta la finca de su abuela en Somerset, pasando por sus propios jardines de Oxford y Londres, y por la floresta de El paraiso perdido de Milton y los laberintos de Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas. Un libro que explora el vinculo entre literatura y naturaleza, entre las palabras y las flores, entre la tinta y la tierra, en un embriagador recorrido que nos lleva de vuelta al hogar primigenio de la humanidad.

Claudia Hampton has lived a full life as historian, reporter, lover, mother. Now she is dying in a London hospital, where she remembers the events in her life, particularly a romance with a tank commander during World War II, a passion that defined much of the rest of her life. This novel won the Booker Prize the year it was published.