A prolific novelist and short-story writer, Penelope Lively thus far has published more than forty books for children and adults in a writing career spanning a little less than thirty years. In no way, however, has quality been sacrificed for quantity:...

Penelope Lively has achieved popular success and high critical acclaim for her books for children written in the 1970s and for her later novels and short stories for adults. She is regarded today as one of Britain's most respected writers. She has...

Penelope Lively has been a prolific writer since the appearance of her first book in 1970. Some of her books for children have already been called classics, and her more recent novels for adults have also been highly acclaimed. Britain's highest award...

Penelope Lively, 63, is a Booker and Whitbread prizewinner. The paperback of Heat Wave, her latest novel, will be published in June, as will Beyond the Blue Mountains, her new collection of short stories. Chapter one: Primary school? No. I didn't go to...

Penelope dir. Mark Palansky I'd hoped watching Christina Ricci wearing a prosthetic pig nose for 101 minutes would add at least a grain of amusement to this romantic comedy. I was wrong. Penelope, produced by and costarring Reese Witherspoon-her second such mishap,...

[Penelope Lively's] quality can best be conveyed by saying that she is the kind of writer that Barbara Pym might have been if she had married and had children. The setting of Judgement Day … might be that of a Pym novel; and that, at the centre of this village and the events that take place in it, there should always loom up the church of St Peter and St Paul, with a 14th-century wall-painting, the Doom, as 'its glory and surprise', is precisely what one might expect if Barbara P...

The American Jewish immigrants of Bernard Malamud's stories inhabit a world of their own spiritual past and an unanchored present. Anxious, needy, pathetic, blinkered, faltering, kindly, they stumble through life with only the most tenuous links with the places they live in. Penelope Lively's characters are set solidly in and against market towns, Saxon churches, Aldeburgh beaches, High Streets with Smiths, Boots and Sainsburys in them. Yet Malamud's favourite theme—of giving and...

[In Treasures of Time, Lively] reveals a gift for highlighting character-types, picking out revealing details of social behaviour, manner and conversation, and a certain ability to hit a nail ironically on the head. She is technically inventive and assured, and her book reads a little like the work of Elizabeth Jane Howard—a compliment indeed. Yet I do not think she has yet proved that she possesses a talent for writing adult fiction of anything like the high order of her children's books. Tre...