The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

by Penelope Lively

Overview

A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner.

“Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings.

In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’s villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery, and even retribution—as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap.

Each of these delightful stories is elevated by Lively’s signature graceful prose and eye for the subtle yet powerfully evocative detail. Wry, charming, and keenly insightful, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735222052
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/08/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Penelope Lively is an award-winning novelist and author of children’s literature. She received the Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger and wide acclaim for The Photograph and How It All Began. Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. In recognition of her contributions to British literature, she has been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She lives in London.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

March 17, 1933

Place of Birth:

Cairo, Egypt

Education:

Honors Degree in Modern History, University of Oxford, England, 1955

Table of Contents

The Purple Swamp Hen 1

Abroad 11

The Row 25

Who Do You Think You Were? 33

Old as the Hills 47

A Biography 55

The Weekend 79

License to Kill 89

Mrs. Bennet 99

Lorna and Tom 111

Point of View 127

DIY 137

The Bridge 151

Theory of Mind 175

The Third Wife 191

Editorial Reviews

The stories are compact yet often novelistic in scope, deftly alighting on the seemingly trivial moments that determine the direction of relationships and lives.”
—The New Yorker

“Impressive, surprising, and fun.”
—Boris Kachka, New York Magazine

“Lively’s productivity has been so steady and reliable that she is sometimes taken a little for granted. In this country she is not nearly as well-known as she ought to be. . . . Her prose is sharp, precise, perfectly pitched, but shrinks from flashiness. . . . Her books just get crisper and more tightly controlled.”
—Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review

“Throughout, Lively deftly and crisply reveals the challenges and secrets in domestic relationships, as well moral and emotional qualms and the unexpected arc of unsung individual lives. . . . So graceful is her prose, so acute her understanding of the ‘muddle’ of human behavior and emotional chaos beneath British reserve, it is clear this compact format also is Lively’s métier.”
—The Seattle Times

“Lively has an impeccable ear. All stories but one are animated by an unflappable omniscient narrator, swimming effortlessly between exterior and interior points of view. Lively is considered a traditional writer, but her unconventional transitions are subtly experimental. . . . Her stories reinvent the world.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the wonderful things about short story collections like Penelope Lively’s is their diversity of settings. . . . Lively’s writing is poignantly funny, and the theme seems to be one we can all relate to: the existential misunderstanding of one another and the impossibility of changing this fact. Managing to juggle the light and dark as only the most skilled can, Lively’s collection is well worth your time and emotions.”
—Read It Forward

“How well do we ever know another person? That’s the leitmotif of this witty but piercing new collection by Man Booker winner Lively. . . .  Even in her darkest tales, Lively’s fundamentally serious take on our tangled emotional lives is never bleak, merely ruefully accepting. A treasure trove of fictional gems.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Lively struts her stuff in this collection of delectably acerbic and canny short stories. In gin-and-tonic prose, Lively, steeped in history and fluent in English conventions, is keenly forensic when it comes to the nature of hypocrisy and stoicism, secrecy and lies. . . . . Lively, perfect for fans of the Margarets Atwood and Drabble, as well as Shirley Jackson, neatly tracks class divides, the fizzling of marriages, and a long-brewing rivalry. Droll fables and mordant ghost stories round out this adroitly wise and mischievous gathering.”
—Booklist

“The same measured intelligence and subtle humor that characterizes Lively’s novels is present in this story collection. The stories often bear rereading, as Lively’s quiet elegance rolls by so smoothly. . . . Effortless and masterly.”
—Publishers Weekly


Praise for Penelope Lively

“Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“One of our most talented writers.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A consummate storyteller.”
—The Seattle Times

“In her own late seventies now, with a legion of regular readers and newcomers with every book, Lively continues to surprise and illuminate, writing to ever more dazzling effect.”
—The Boston Globe

“Witty, gentle-humored, sharp . . . Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator.”
—NPR’s All Things Considered

From the Publisher

03/20/2017
The same measured intelligence and subtle humor that characterizes Lively’s novels (like the Booker-winning Moon Tiger) is present in this story collection. The stories often bear rereading, as Lively’s quiet elegance rolls by so smoothly. “The Weekend” charts a series of accumulating missteps in a country getaway involving two couples and a disturbingly unflappable eight-year-old. “Mrs. Bennet” is an homage to Austen, the title character very like the matriarch in Pride and Prejudice, with a houseful of unmarried daughters and struggling to keep her house together in Britain in 1947. “Theory of Mind” charts the romantic relationship of two highly cerebral people. Most of the stories are short and feel like beautifully rendered portraits or slices of life. The title story is narrated by the singularly erudite hen living in the garden of an ambitious Roman politician and narrowly escaping the eruption of Vesuvius. Two longer stories, “A Biography” and “The Bridge,” have shaggier structures and deal idiosyncratically with the advantages and disadvantages of advanced age, the former via a series of interviews and the latter in a first-person narrative. An effortless and masterly collection. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/15/2017
Many stories here feature women getting on in age, reflecting on their long and interesting lives. In "Old as the Hills," two women meet for lunch at a quiet restaurant to discuss what they have in common—namely, a recently deceased husband who one stole from the other. In "License To Kill," 84-year-old Pauline is out on a shopping trip with her young minder, who has fixed ideas about her elderly charge, until she learns that Pauline once worked as a spy. Booker Prize winner Lively is equally good at writing about the younger generation. In "The Weekend," a couple and their young daughter are invited to the swanky Cotswolds cottage of the husband's old college friend. While the couples mingle uncomfortably, their daughter makes an unusual friend. The final story, "The Third Wife" is a wicked delight: A wily scoundrel who marries and then abandons rich women from whom he embezzles fortunes finally gets his comeuppance when the third wife catches on to his game. VERDICT Lively (How It All Began), like many of her octogenarian characters, remains an acutely perceptive observer of the human condition. This charming collection, ranging from ancient Pompeii to modern-day London, is proof that her gifts have only ripened with age.

Library Journal

★ 2017-02-21
How well do we ever know another person? That's the leitmotif of this witty but piercing new collection by Man Booker winner Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites, 2014, etc.).The title story sets the tone: narrated by an exotic pet in Roman Pompeii, shortly to be eradicated by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius, it shows genuine communication only between the purple swamp hen and a slave girl in an aristocratic household otherwise roiled by people who can't get along and communicate (angrily) only in a crisis. The collection's keystone, "A Biography," couples interviews conducted for a book about Lavinia Talbot, a charismatic public intellectual, with the interviewees' private, unshared recollections to create a poignant portrait of a woman with a secret wound at the heart of her life's work and to simultaneously suggest that we can never fully understand her. "Lorna and Tom" also painfully demonstrates the possibility of loving someone without ever really grasping his or her essence, giving a quietly wrenching account of a marriage that ultimately founders on the shoals of Britain's terminal class-consciousness—though not, because Lively rarely does the expected, in the way readers might anticipate. Yet there are also radiant stories like "Point of View," in which a screenwriter and her live-in boyfriend, each yearning for a child and convinced the other doesn't want one, finally stumble into mutual accord. "The Bridge" is perhaps the collection's best showcase of Lively's gift for embracing the full range of human complexity. "How can something have happened twice over? One way for him, another for me?" asks a woman about a family tragedy she and her husband literally saw differently. Yet the story's conclusion shows the characters groping to surmount their limited perspectives, prodded by love. A droll update of Pride and Prejudice and a couple of satisfyingly scary ghost stories provide some lighter entertainment, and even in her darkest tales, Lively's fundamentally serious take on our tangled emotional lives is never bleak, merely ruefully accepting. A treasure trove of fictional gems.

Kirkus Reviews