What makes this protagonist feel different is also what makes her precious. I highly recommend this read for quiet, sensitive, or empathic people. It moved at an incredibly slow pace, and my 13-year-old (who was the audience for this one) and I were frequently frustrated by that, but, ultimately, we were won over by the writing and the story. This one, I feel, gives a nod to the moody atmosphere of Jane Austen's Persuasion and the drama that takes place in that novel in Lyme Regis. Yes, did you know that? Did you know that Penelope Lively had an abundant career writing chapter books for tweens and teens before she ever started writing novels for adults? Lively ponders here, in one of the many novels she wrote for middle grades and adolescent readers in the 1970s. We're here, then we're gone, and maybe we're back again, in different forms. Life is fleeting it etches itself on stones, rubs its back on the walls of caves, leaves its mark wherever it may. They are, after all, the traces of what is left behind, what was here, what isn't here any more. I appreciate fossils as metaphors in stories. I don't know what it is, or what it is she does, but she pulls me into every story she writes, even when they're about people who hunt for and talk about fossils.

It's official Penelope Lively is the only person who can make me interested in fossils. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

Her other books include Going Back Judgement Day Next to Nature, Art Perfect Happiness Passing On City of the Mind Cleopatra’s Sister Heat Wave Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt Spiderweb her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked The Photograph Making It Up Consequences Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.

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. Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children.

A stitch in time lively novel