November 2020: Ammonites & Leaping Fish

Introduction to Ammonites and Leaping Fish

This 'view from old age' from one of our most loved and respected authors offers powerful reflections on memory, history, possessions and old age itself. By turn insightful, diverting, funny and moving, this is a brilliantly idiosyncratic memoir and an elegant book.

About the author

Novelist and children's writer Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933 and brought up there. She came to England in 1945, went to school in Sussex, and read Modern History at St Ann's College, Oxford. Lively has written countless novels and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel award. She has written three volumes of autobiography, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), a description of her childhood spent in Egypt, A House Unlocked (2001), which continues the story in England and Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), which she bills as 'not quite a memoir' but a reflection on old age and memory.

Penelope Lively contributes regularly to a number of national daily newspapers and literary and educational journals including the Sunday Times, The Observer and the Times Educational Supplement.

Book Details

Paperback: 240 pages

ISBN: 0241966981

Publisher: Penguin (7 Aug. 2014)