Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave, and Family Album.
One of Lively's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox FordRead about another book on the list.
Ford Madox Ford’s best-known novel is wonderfully clever, with a story that unfolds little by little, its shape changing all the time as we learn more—or as what we have already learned from its narrator is shown to be unreliable. Two couples and two young women—predators and victims.
The Good Soldier also appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best spas in literature, ten of the best failed couplings in literature, and ten great novels with terrible original titles, and on the Guardian's list of ten of the best unconsummated passions in fiction and Adam Haslett's list of the five best novelists on grief. One line from the novel appears among Stanley Fish's top five sentences.
The Page 99 Test: The Good Soldier.
See Penelope Lively's five best list of books that evoke time & place.
--Marshal Zeringue
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