“She knows that she does not believe – not really – the stories she tells of Frederick. She knows she does not believe – not really – the opinions of Frederick’s psychiatrists, her relatives, her own family. She knows that she still does not believe that it is as simple as others tell her it ought to be, as she tells herself it ought to be: that she was sane, while Frederick was mad; that she performed the heroic necessary work of saving her family, while, in his mental hospital, Frederick ‘indulged in the escapist writing behavior’ (his psychiatrist’s words) that is now in Katharine’s hands. Sane mad, heroic, dissolute, earnest, deluded: she knows she does not believe – not really – in those simple divisions into which she has spent the last twenty years organizing her past.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 1, 2011)

Stefan Merrill Block has written a novel so irrepressibly beautiful and poetic that it left me stunned. The Storm at the Door is based on the life of his grandparents, Frederick and Katharine. Partly imagined and partly based on fact, this is the story of a troubled family dealing with mental illness, secrets, and denial. It is also about the horror and the power of a psychiatric hospital, along with the myriad patients who have enacted their trust in this institution.

Frederick and Katharine met on the cusp of World War II and were married six months later. Theirs was a love affair based mostly on correspondence and the desperation of wartime. For some unknown reason, Frederick does not finish out his service and is placed in a naval hospital. When he is released he looks like a victim of starvation. The reasons for these events are never truly clear to Katharine.

Frederick is charismatic and the life of the party. He is also rowdy and loves his bourbon. He begins to be unfaithful to Katharine early on in their marriage. He disappears for days at a time and comes home promising to change and be a better man and husband. He has lots of plans and aspirations, none of which seem to come to fruition. He cannot hold down a job for long although he has an MBA from Harvard. When he drinks, which he seems to do to self-medicate, he is inappropriate but he is usually able to steer clear of getting into all-out trouble. Katharine’s goal in life is to please others and she constantly and consistently forgives Frederick his transgressions.

One auspicious evening in 1962, Frederick drinks at least five bourbons and leaves the party they are at, borrowing a friend’s raincoat. He is naked underneath. He walks up to the nearest road and flashes either his rump or his genitals to oncoming traffic. Most of the cars just peer and go on. However, two old ladies call the police and Frederick is handcuffed and taken to jail. He has the option of prison or entering a psychiatric hospital. Katharine, with the help of her friends and relatives, decides to commit him to Mayflower Hospital , a fictional hospital based on the actual McClean Hospital in Massachusetts. McClean has been a temporary shelter for the poet Robert Lowell, singer James Taylor, and mathematician John Nash. It is supposedly the best psychiatric hospital in the country. What Katharine and Frederick don’t realize, however, is that Frederick’s hospitalization is not strictly voluntary. He is to remain at Mayflower until the chief psychiatrist sees fit to release him.

When Frederick first enters the hospital, it is very laid back and the patients have privileges and room to move – physically and psychically. There are cows in the pasture and the setting is idyllic, designed by the great architect Frederick Law Olmsted on 65 beautiful acres. Frederick has been diagnosed with manic depression and the diagnosis appears to be quite accurate.

The stories of different patients are shared with the reader. There is Robert Lowell. the poet, who suffers from manic depression. There is Professor Shultz, the Harvard linguist who hears sounds in the words he reads, whose life of loss and tragedy most likely contributed to his first psychotic break as well as his subsequent ones. There is Marvin, the most famous patient at Mayflower, a man of 15 distinct personalities ranging from a French poet to Carmen Miranda. There is James Marshall, a war veteran with only one limb (and not all his limbs were lost in the war) who can fold the U.S. flag with his one remaining arm, raise it on the flag pole daily and take it down lovingly every night to refold.

Unfortunately, the administration of the hospital changes and a psychiatrist with little empathy and a desire for complete control takes the helm. During group therapy, he delights in bringing up painful aspects of each patient’s illness and they cringe in the mandated group therapy with him. He betrays each and every one of them in some great way.

The novel is told in alternating viewpoints; one chapter from Katharine’s and the other from Frederick’s. The structure works well. We understand what Frederick is going through in the desperate situation of his hospitalization, which goes on for months. He struggles with multiple solitary confinements and ECT (electric shock) treatments. We also see how hard it is for Katharine to sustain her family as a single parent and to maintain the strength she knows that she needs to have in order to find herself. She is gaining insight on codependency and sees that her desire to please helps everyone but herself.

All of the characters are given great depth. The patients, and the extent of their illnesses, is poetically described. Block gets mental illness, both the beauty and despair that go along with it. His poetic imagery and narrative never falter and the beauty of the book is sustained until the end. This is by far one of the best books I have read in the last ten years. It is a phenomenal feat of love and writing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stefan Merrill Block
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• The Story of Forgetting (2009)
• The Storm at the Door (June 2011)

“Our lord would have smoked if there’d been any tobacco about in the land of Galilee. He drank, didn’t he?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (NOV 04, 2010)

Prolific mystery writer Ruth Rendell’s work can be divided into two categories: the Inspector Wexford novels and her psychological novels. Portobello falls into the latter category and fans of Ruth Rendell know what to expect. The novel concentrates on the poisoned lives of a handful of characters who are connected to London’s Portobello Road, and these characters are as varied and colourful as the district itself. Rendell brings her characters together with her usual skill–although the heavy reliance on coincidence argues against the idea that London is, after all, a city of millions of people.

The novel’s first chapter offers a brief overview of the history of Portobello Road as well as a brief introduction to the Wren and Gibson families. A piece of post WWII good fortune allows the Wrens to move to the upscale Chepstow Villas while the Gibsons are doomed to the margins of society. The novel then bounds ahead several decades to the next generation. Gilbert Gibson, a repeat offender who’s now a middle-age sanctimonious, parsimonious member of the Church of the Children of Zebulun lives in a slum in a neighbourhood undergoing significant gentrification. He’s the “agony uncle” for the Zebulun magazine and offers exuberant moral and spiritual castigation to the sinners misguided enough to seek advice. On the other end of the social spectrum, fifty-year-old bachelor Eugene Wren owns a swanky art gallery, and his exquisite Chepstow Villas house is tastefully decorated with valuable antiques.

After a mugging, Eugene Wren discovers an envelope stuffed full of cash. He decides to place an ad in the paper asking the person who lost the money to call at his home and identify the precise sum. This act brings two very different young men into Eugene’s life–Lance, the terminally unemployed nephew of Gilbert Gibson, and Joel Roseman, a seriously disturbed man ejected from his wealthy home.

Rendell’s focus here is obsession, addictions and class differences. The have-nots such as Lance and his criminal pals are worlds apart from upper-middle-class Eugene Wren, but both sides of the economic divide fail to recognize the humanity in those more, or less, fortunate than themselves. Lance, for example, sees Eugene as “White Hair,” while Eugene sees Lance as “a non-descript sort of young man, all skin and bone, fairish, potato-faced but what did it matter?”

Eugene Wren is distracted by the contemplation of marriage to his long-term girlfriend Ella, a doctor, and so the meeting with Lance is just a minor aside. Lance, however, doesn’t forget the house and its contents. He stews over the high-end items he noted in the house and his obsession and resentment gradually grow:
”He was soon cursing the kind of people who don’t need to work until nine thirty or ten. What did that rich guy do for a living?”

Meanwhile Eugene experiences no small reluctance at the idea of total cohabitation, but this worry is superseded by his concern about his recent weight gain. To combat his spreading paunch, he begins buying diet sweets, and this minor habit rapidly morphs into a secret addiction. While Lance stews with class resentment, he’s under pressure to get quick cash, and Eugene struggles to hide his habit from a perceptive Ella. All the characters are set on an inevitable collision course.

The secret lives, obsessions and concerns of the various characters are relayed with almost savage delight but also with a faint whiff of condescension. While no one class of characters is treated better than another (Joel’s very wealthy family, for example, is quite appalling), the lower-class characters are portrayed in various shades of criminality–and inept criminals at that (at one point a chocolate cake is stolen and consumed). Fans of Rendell won’t be able to help themselves, and for its geographical focus, Portobello will recall Rendell’s novel The Rottweiler. Portobello, however, while malicious in tone is not Rendell’s darkest, and at this point, The Tree of Hands still reigns as Rendell’s masterpiece.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ruth Rendell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide Guy Savage’s review of Tigerlily’s Orchids
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of some of Rendell’s outstanding stand-alone novels: 13 Steps Down Rottweiler Live Flesh The Keys to the Street  The Crocodile Bird Read a review of the first Insp. Wexford in this long series: From Doon with Death and more recent: The Vault Not in the Flesh The Monster in the Box Also, some of her books written as Barbara Vine

Bibliography:

Inspector Wexford Mysteries:

• From Doon with Death (1964)
• A New Lease of Death (1967) (retitled: Sins of the Fathers)
• Wolf to the Slaughter (1967)
• The Best Man to Die (1969)
• A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970)
• No More Dying Then (1971)
• Murder Being Once Done (1972)
• Some Lie and Some Die (1973)
• Shake Hands Forever (1975)
• A Sleeping Life (1978)
• Put on the Cunning (1981) (a.k.a Death Notes)
• Speaker of Mandarin (1983)
• An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)
• The Veiled One (1988)
• Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (1992)
• Simisola (1995)
• Road Rage (1997)
• Harm Done (November 1999)
• The Babes in the Wood (2003)
• End in Tears (July 2006)
• Not in the Flesh (2008)
• The Vault (2011)
• No Man’s Nightingale (November 2013)

Standalone Mysteries & Psychological Thrillers:

• To Fear a Painted Devil (1965)
• Vanity Dies Hard (1965)
• The Secret House of Death (1968)
• One Across, Two Down (1971)
• The Face of Trespass (1974)
• A Demon in My View (1976)
• A Judgement in Stone (1977)
• Make Death Love Me (1979)
• The Lake of Darkness (1980)
• Master of the Moor (1982)
• The Killing Doll (1984)
• The Tree of Hands (1984)
• Live Flesh (1986)
• Heartstones (1987)
• Talking to Strange Men (1987)
• The Bridesmaid (1989)
• Going Wrong (1990)
• The Crocodile Bird (1993)
• The Keys to the Street (1996)
• A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999)
• Adam and Eve and Pinch (2002)
• The Rottweiler (2004)
• Thirteen Steps Down (2005)
• The Water’s Lovely (2007)
• Portobello (2010)
• Tigerlily’s Orchids (2011)
• The St. Zita Society (2012)
• The Child’s Child (2012)

Collections:

• The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976)
• Means of Evil (1979)
• The Fever Tree (1982)
• The Copper Peacock (1991)
• Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories (1996)
• Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories (2001)

Movies from books:

• Dead Lucky (The Lake of Darkness)
• An Affair of the Mind (1988)
• A Demon in My View (1992)
• Master of the Moor
• A Judgement in Stone
• La Ceremonie (1996) (A Judgement in Stone)
• Live Flesh (1998)

“To realize how lucky she was to have survived her own incautious past always sent a shudder through Catherine—one run red light, one inexplicable pill, one bad man, one unforgivable decision, and everything would have turned out otherwise.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 25, 2010)

Set mostly in Wichita, Kansas, Antonya Nelson’s Bound drops us right into the lives of a handful of characters. These characters are mostly connected by familial or marital bonds, and yet there are other bonds here too–the bonds of loyalty and friendship. At the centre of the story is Catherine Desplaines, married to a successful, wealthy, and much older businessman husband, Oliver.

Childless Catherine leads a sterile, but even existence as Oliver’s trophy wife #3. Her life is built around Oliver’s wishes and social obligations, and she’s got the sort of rosy, undemanding temperament that accepts all of Oliver’s unspoken expectations. Oliver, a strange, emotionally disconnected man, already had children from his previous wives, and those relationships have turned out to be disastrous. Catherine, always keeping Oliver’s needs to the forefront, seems oblivious to the fact that in many ways she’s paying for the “mistakes” of Oliver’s ex-wives. Catherine’s life changes, however, when she receives a letter informing her that due to the death of a childhood friend, Misty Mueller, she’s now the guardian of a teenage girl.

It’s a savage twist of fate that Catherine now feels morally obligated to raise her former friend’s child as the intrusion of a damaged teenage girl will challenge the tranquility of Oliver’s home life and his calculating selfishness. After all, Catherine’s other major relationship is with her mother, Grace, a former professor and a stroke victim, who’s been shuffled off to the “grim” nursing home, Green Acres:

“Only the most modest of efforts had been made to hide its institutional aspects—standing lamps in some rooms to take the place of the overhead fluorescents; a volunteer harpist who arrived on Tuesdays to roll her battered instrument out of its closet, ready to play for whomever requested it; and the three fat cats who lived in the television lounge, leaping lazily from lap to lap, heavy staticky creatures who’d been rescued from their Alzheimer’s-afflicted owners.”

Grace never approved of Catherine’s marriage to Oliver, and a silent war of disapproval has been waged for almost twenty years. While Oliver has the money to provide better for Grace, he doesn’t, and he refuses to even visit as Grace vegetates in the stink of an understaffed nursing home:

“How was Green Acres?” her husband would ask, when Catherine came home. He never joined her. He preferred to treat the place like a joke. He was only a few years younger than his mother-in-law.

Catherine’s sudden unexpected guardianship of a girl she didn’t even know existed doesn’t exactly test the Desplaines’ marriage as Oliver is already mired in an affair that he fully expects to evolve into marriage #4. But the death of Misty Mueller does have some unexpected ramifications on the characters: Catherine remembers her youthful, unlikely friendship with Misty–a “white trash” girl who came from a poor neighbourhood. As Catherine becomes embroiled in the past, she begins to understand that she opted for a life of no risk while Misty ran headlong into disaster. Meanwhile, Oliver is faced with some painful, long overdue truths about aging.

All this unfolds against the back story of the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer. Catherine remembers the murders that terrified Wichita in the 70s, and the nursing home residents are fascinated by the case which resurfaces as the BTK killer makes a “comeback” and begins taunting the police about his crimes.

Bound is not a perfect novel. It’s strongest when examining Catherine’s marriage to Oliver, Oliver’s tangled relationships with his ex-wives, and Catherine’s past relationship with Misty. Tiny clues are subtly dropped through the book to hint at unexplored depths of Oliver and Catherine’s relationship. In one instance, for example, Oliver advises Catherine to take a valium, and he conveniently keeps a supply on hand–no wonder she’s so mellow and pliant. These glimpses into the marriage aren’t overworked–they’re just dropped as clues to the deeper problems in this relationship.

There were a couple of extraneous story threads that didn’t add much to the tale, and they could have been surgically removed with very little damage. Oliver’s constant references to “the sweetheart” were irritating, Catherine Mueller is an unsatisfactory, shallow figure, and the episodes involving Misty Mueller’s dog were distracting. That said, I liked Bound a great deal. I liked the mostly sharp characterizations, and I liked the way in which the author drew parallels between her characters. Catherine, for example, really doesn’t know her husband well at all even though she directs their lives towards what she thinks are his comforts and his desires. She thinks he loves their Corgis, for example, but Oliver doesn’t allow them in his bedroom. Oliver’s relationship with his dogs isn’t much better than his other relationships: everyone is a replaceable accoutrement when they get old, tiresome or ill. To Oliver everything is a transaction: his relationships with his children, his relationships with his ex-wives, and even his relationship with his mistress are all founded on money. At one point, he very coldly assesses Catherine while noting that her shelf life has more or less expired.

There’s a coldness and a secretiveness to Oliver which parallels the double life of the BTK killer. The true characters of these men remain unknown to their families–although Oliver’s secret life is not uncommon and is considered socially acceptable while the BTK killer’s secret life is, of course, far more deadly. As the story unfolds, and the various characters respond to the tragedy of Misty’s death, Bound explores the idea that our relationships with other people reveal a great deal about who we really are. Some of my favourite scenes involved Oliver at Green Acres visiting his mother-in-law; he’s an intriguing, although repellent character, and an excellent example of how one man can be so successful and yet be completely devoid of any self-evaluation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page Antonya Nelson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide Publisher page on Bound
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• The Expendables: Stories (1990)
• In the Land of Men: Stories (1992)
• Family Terrorists: Stories (1996)
• Talking in Bed (1998)
• Nobody’s Girl (1999)
• Living to Tell (2000)
• Female Trouble: Stories (2002)
• Some Fun: Stories and a Novella (2006)
• Nothing Right: Short Stories (2009)
• Bound (2010)
• Funny Once: Stories (May 2014)

“Gwen’s a model citizen, you know that. It was just a wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing. I can see this just going away.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUL 27, 2010)

Debut novelist Klein has written a smart and nervy domestic drama/thriller. The pages fly, and the prose is crisp and economical. He tackles difficult, dicey, and controversial subject matter without handing out platitudes or falling into blunt party line agendas. I am tempted to call it a non-puff beach read. It is lively, energetic, and easily accessible, but it is also thought provoking and ultimately bold.

Loving mother and housewife Gwen Raine bought some pot from ex-boyfriend Jude for recreational use. On the way home, driving down some precarious mountain roads, she was involved in a car accident. She was hit by an elderly driver (suffering from dementia), and both end up in the ER. Although Gwen was not at fault, the police found the bag in her car and the THC in her system, and now the DA is poised to strong-arm or throw the book at her due to escalating drug sales in the community.

Concurrently, husband Brian is having some problems at his high-paying job at Caladon Pharmaceuticals. They have been walking a fine line with marketing an anti-anxiety medication as an off-label weight loss drug. Some speculative and hazardous risks were taken by the company’s executives, which threaten to topple over onto Brian. The Raines have separate stressors and two small children together. The marriage is now loaded with accumulating anxieties and legal problems. How–or if–they pull through keeps the reader on edge.

Told from multiple narrative perspectives in alternating chapters, the story focuses primarily on Gwen and Brian Raine; the enigmatic and laconic Jude; and Jude’s daughter, Dana. Gwen and Brian’s depiction as a suburban married couple devoted to their children do fall into a quasi-stock profile. The “form” of their characters is familiar. However, Klein keeps the story taut and the reader tense by compounding the problems resulting from a ripple effect that connects the characters to each other. He convincingly pushes the envelope with Gwen. She is faced with difficult ethical and moral choices, and her responses aren’t canned or predictable.

Jude is morally ambiguous, and I applaud the author for an honest and organic rendering of this character, never falling into an easy trap of stereotype. Moreover, Klein doesn’t demonize all recreational pot smokers into categorical addicts or amoral/immoral deviants. He aptly illustrates the various lifestyle choices that people make and the consequences of their behaviors.

The author did his research and applied his details fluently. I worked for a company that performed drug trials, and I recognize the spot-on ethical dilemmas and vicissitudes that were portrayed and plagued Brian.

The denouement was tidy on one front, luridly messy on another. Klein doesn’t tarnish it by creating a sea change in his characters or laying on a heavy-handed, disingenuous morality. The final and anticlimactic scene was authentic and arch, and I admire the author for his audacious and honest story. It is sure to create animated discussions, which makes it an excellent selection for broad-minded book club readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Matthew Klein
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Also read our review of: Blame by Michele Huneven

Bibliography:

• Stash (July 2010)

“The kitchen was the heartland of Allersmead. Of course. That is so in any well-adjusted family home, and Allersmead was a shrine to family. The kitchen was huge; once, some Edwardian cook would have presided here, serving up Sunday roast to some prosperous Edwardian group. Now there was – no, not an Aga but a big battered old gas cooker, a dresser cluttered with plates, cups, mugs, a scrubbed table that would seat a dozen. There were children’s drawings still tucked behind the crockery on the dresser, a painted papier-mâché tiger on a shelf, alongside a row of indeterminate clay animals that someone made earlier. There were named mugs slung from hooks: Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger, Clare.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (FEB 11, 2010)

British novelist Lively, winner of the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger) and an expert in the darkish art of domestic wit, celebrates big, happy families in her twenty-second book, Family Album. To matriarch Alison, family is, simply, what she lives for, even now that her six children have dispersed to distant parts and seldom return.

The novel opens with one such return, however. Gina (second oldest), 39, brings her new boyfriend, Philip, to meet her parents and see her rather larger-than-life childhood setting, Allersmead. The house is a rambling Edwardian pile with seven bedrooms, presided over still by Alison, husband Charles and the Swedish au pair, Ingrid, who arrived 40 years before and has never left.

Philip is intrigued, even a little envious, impressed by the many photos and mementos, the large garden, Alison’s wonderful and abundant food, the idea of the family teeming over the place.

“Gina continued to hear voices, her life was still flashing at her. It seemed odd that Philip could be impervious to this, that a person with whom one had become so absolutely intimate could be so perversely ignorant. Not know. Not see and hear. One is sealed off, she thought. So is he. So’s everyone. No wonder there’s mayhem.”

Her father, Charles, however, has made an art form out of sealing himself off from the mayhem. “Charles is immersed – in his train of thought, in the organization of words, of sentences. Time passes – but, for him, it seems to stand still. He looks out the window occasionally, unseeing, thoughts tumble in his head. He is elsewhere, inside his mind, in pursuit of an argument, a sequence.”

With the help of a small private income, Charles has devoted his life to writing books on any subject that captures his interest. The books are (or were) accessible and widely read, although not by anyone in his immediate family. His study seems an alien, sacrosanct territory inside the fecund chaos of the family manse.

He emerges for meals, engages newcomers (like Philip) in arcane discussions, handles the finances. Alison does everything else. With Ingrid’s somewhat implacable assistance. No one seems to know what Ingrid thinks, or ever thought, about anything, yet she is such an integral part of the family Allersmead cannot be imagined without her.

Naturally there are secrets. What family doesn’t have secrets?

These begin to emerge after Gina and Philip depart for home and the novel proceeds from various points of view at various times over the last forty years. Gina’s 8th birthday, “of which everyone will remember something different.” A summer holiday in Cornwall, which Katie remembers as “one commotion after another,” and Roger remembers as “amazing.” “I had that kite. I got seriously into marine biology.”

There were the cellar games, which excluded adults so completely that they knew nothing about them. The sibling rivalry between cerebral Gina and pretty Sandra. Paul’s youthful binges, which have somehow never stopped.

And there is the greatest gulf of all. “…their parents seemed to hover – presences that are entirely known, familiar and also unreachable, enigmatic.” As adults the children wonder about them to each other. The six children were obviously Alison’s raison d’etre, but what about Charles? Did he want that many? Did he want any?

Alison works hardest at keeping unpleasantness at bay. It’s more than sweeping things under the carpet. Alison will do almost anything to preserve her happy family.

And this family has one very big secret, known to all. “Not that there were conversations, exchanges, comments. No one has wished to discuss it; if ever the facts of the matter seemed to smolder dangerously, there would be a concerted move to stamp out the embers, to move away, to find safe territory elsewhere.”

This secret comes out fairly early in the novel, the biggest among other, smaller crises that have been dealt with and set aside. With her sharp wit and sympathetic understanding of human nature, Lively explores the ways families conspire in their secrets, the way memories inform a life and each life makes different memories of the same experience, the way one “happy family” is eight individual people all sequestered inside their own heads, all striving after their own interests.

For the reader Alison and Charles emerge as both repellant and sympathetic characters. To their children they remain, determinedly, enigmas.

An absorbing, witty portrait of family in all its warts and warmth, Lively’s latest will please her fans with its sharp characterizations and absorbing narrative path.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (October 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Penelope Lively
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Consequences Making It Up

Bibliography:

• The Road to Lichfield (1977)
• Nothing Missing But the Samovar: stories (1978)
• Treasures of Time (1979)
• Judgement Day (1980)
• Next to Nature, Art (1982)
• Perfect Happiness (1983)
• Corruption and other stories (1984)
• According to Mark (1984)
• Pack of Cards : stories (1986)
• Moon Tiger (1987)
• Passing On (1989)
• City of the Mind (1991)
• Cleopatras’s Sister (1993)
• Heat Wave (1996)
• Spiderweb (1998)
• The Photograph (2003)
• Making It Up (2005)
• Consequences (2007)
• Family Album (2009)
• How It All Began (2011)

Nonfiction:

• The Presence of the Past: An introduction to landscape history (1976)
• Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994)
• A House Unlocked (2001)
• Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (February 2014)

Some of her Children’s Books:

• A Stitch In Time (1976)
• One, Two, Three…Jump (1998)
• Spooky Stories (August 2009)