Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived. -- Daily Telegraph
Clever and poignant . . . there is much to enjoy. This is Lively at her best. -- Sunday Express
The twentieth century shook the world: it sobers me to have been one of those to see it through.
Ten years ago, Penelope Lively, then eighty, wrote this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', reporting back on what she found. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she's been - fragments of memories from a life well lived.
Ten years on, Lively returns to the same questions in a new chapter, On Being Ninety, included in this new edition.
A superb study of memory and of her own voyage into the ninth decade of her life. Lively is a compelling, vitally interested witness to time past. -- Helen Dunmore, Observer, Books of the Year