Like all of Lively’s best novels, The Road to Lichfield contains beneath its modest veneer great depths of intelligence, perception and feeling, not to mention a thoroughly believable and interesting cast of characters.””Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World For a moment Anne thought again of Southwold, revived just now for the first time in many years; she saw that same body, upright in a pewter sea, urging her towards it with outstretched hands. She said, “Yes, I suppose so.” And then, “He seems quite comfortable.” Everybody sends their love’ – yes, her voice was coming out loud and overbright – ‘don was sorry he couldn’t get away just now but it’s a bit of a bad time at the office. Paul’s got O-levels coming up, you know, this year, so he’s actually doing a bit of work I’m glad to say. Judy’s having riding lessons, I didn’t want her getting involved in all that kind of thing but it’s hopeless, living where we do’.” Anne’s relationships with her husband, brother, lover and children are never played for melodrama, but lead her to reflect on her past. We thought we’d go to Scotland this year, father, for our holiday. Just Judy and us – Paul has something fixed up with a school party.”

Passing On") it features grown-up siblings, houses and unruly sexuality. But like "Moon Tiger" -- and, again, like quite a few of the author's later works -- it is also concerned with time and memory, the she thinks, musing on the current juxtaposition of the endangered cottage and a new housing development; "I begin to see how slippery the past is," she observes further on. And, still later, "The trouble with the past Oh, do be quiet, she thought, you don’t understand at all, and when he ploughed on with, “Hadn’t you better get hold of Graham?’ she had snapped, “Look, do leave that to me,” and the disagreement might have blossomed and run its proper course except that reasonable people do not quarrel at such a time. Or, indeed, much at all. It's intelligently written and made me think about how we know our loved ones in certain roles and in the way they relate to us and don't often know, especially with our parents, all that they think and feel, dream of and regret. Which is probably for the good!It is hard to describe the impact of this book in a few sentences. It is slow in developing, and I was not sure where it was headed, but once I finished, I felt like I “got it.” This book examines a person’s history, of the passage of time, and memories, and how these elements impact one’s perceptions of life. The tone is quiet and contemplative. The characters are well developed and easy to picture. She said, “I’m sure. He didn’t like retiring – he never could keep away from schools.” They both looked towards the bed again, smiling. for intense emotion forgotten since her early days with Don, who for many years has been utterly absorbed in his career. He is quite comfortable. We can see to that. But he will go downhill from now on, I’m afraid.” The Matron paused and went on, delicately. “I think that if you feel – if you wanted to make arrangements about his house, that kind of thing, it might be wise.” 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.

Despite the death at its center, "The Road to Lichfield" is a pleasant book -- too pleasant, perhaps. We never feel any sense of dismay (or wonder) in Anne at her own newly discovered capacity for duplicity and betrayal, nor does she seem particularly Her father, propped high on pillows that seemed to devour him, their plumpness engulfing his thin face and body, turned his head as they came in, peering. I've become an avid Penelope Lively fan and I dived into this one. It was like diving into cool translucent water on a hot day, so lucid the prose, so calm and unhurried the plot, so careful the nudges towards a theme. This is known territory: middle-class, middle-life, middle-England. Sounds tedious and parochial? What saves it is Lively's understanding of what I'm going to be daring (#pretentious) and call the 'psychic infrastructure' of her chosen subject. man, staring at him intently and with a kind of guilt. It seemed wrong to watch him in this way, when he barely knew one was there, his head nodding, moisture creeping from his eyes, as though one were spying on his senility. Once,

The Matron smoothed her notes again. She said, “Of course. We must think in terms of months, or possibly weeks. It’s very unpredictable, though. He might rally – but I would be surprised. Your visits will be the greatest help. Some of my old people have no visitors – no telephone calls; that I find very sad.” She smiled with sudden sweetness and Anne thought: she is a nice person, kind, good. Or am I in such a state of susceptibility that everyone I meet seems nice? A nurse brought a tray and set it on the bedside table. “There, dear. Are you going to sit up a bit more?’ She said to Anne, “He manages fairly well on his own, but he may need a hand when it comes to the tea.”

Lichfield, of course, is the ultimate fusion of private and public memory. Lichfield belongs once and for all to Samuel Johnson, and is also where my father has lived – or just outside which my father has lived – for the last twenty years. Samuel Johnson, she thought, paying the garage attendant without seeing him or hearing what he said, so that only his finger tapping the closed window recalled her sufficiently to take the proffered change, Samuel Johnson once said a formal farewell to a dying old woman. He sat beside her bed and prayed with her and said goodbye for ever. Nowadays we do not do that. I haven’t, she thought, the slightest idea what I am going to say to father, or even what, if anything, he will be able to say to me. Confused, this Matron person had said, confused and going downhill rapidly, I’m afraid. And Anne had wanted to say: but it is I who am confused, who are you and what are you doing with my father? Before and after visiting hours, Anne stays in her father's house in a village outside Lichfield. She sorts through his papers and putters around in his garden. She also falls in love with one of his neighbors. The affair reawakens in her a capacity A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

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on her arm, removing it almost at once so that it was only later, at another time, that she felt his touch, in the way in which recollection can sometimes be more real than experience itself." And here is Anne, miserably separated