Family Album (Hardcover) ~ Penelope Lively (Author) Cover Art

Family Album (Hardcover)

By: Penelope Lively (Author)

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Review

"Although this little book can't compete with [Lively's] Booker-winning MOON TIGER or her fictionalized anti-memoir CONSEQUENCES, it's another winning demonstration of her wit; every wry laugh is the sound of a little hope being strangled."

"Less a family saga than an impressionistic group portrait, the novel is underpinned by Lively's interest in how a family that shares a home and a set of experiences chooses to react and remember....[T]here's essential craftsmanship at the core of this writer's work and a steadiness that outshines the evanescent."

"Penelope Lively is acute on the detritus and mess of domestic life....Her creation of a chaotic, living family home is pitch perfect, but what she is really discussing here is the idea of the home after the family has left it, and the family when it is no longer together under one roof."

Publisher's note

A novel of family intrigue from aone of the most accomplished writers of fiction of our daya ("The Washington Post")
All Alison ever wanted was a blissful childhood for her six children, with summers at the beach and birthday parties on the lawn at their family home. Together with Ingrid, the family au pair, she has worked hard to create a real aold-fashioned family life.a But beneath its postcard sheen, the picture is clouded by a distant father, Alisonas inexplicable emotional outbursts, and long-repressed secrets that no one dares mention. For years, Alisonas adult children have protected her illusion of domestic perfectionabut as each child confronts the effects of past choices on their current adult lives, it becomes evident that each must face the truth.
Penelope Livelyas novels of history, memory, and character have earned her a loyal readership. Like Ian McEwanas "Atonement," this novel is a measured, thoughtful look at how events of the past, both small and large, seen and unseen, deeply inform character and the present. Quietly provocative and disturbing, "Family Album" is a highly nuanced work that showcases a master of her craft.

Having dedicated herself to styling her family in accordance with her ideals, mother of six Alison finds her illusions wavering in the face of her husband's distance, long-repressed secrets, and her children's respective confrontations with painful truths. By the Booker-winning author of Moon Tiger.

Having dedicated herself to styling her family in accordance with her ideals, mother of six Alison finds her illusions wavering in the face of her husband's distance, long-repressed secrets, and her children's respective confrontations with painful truths. By the Booker-winning author of Moon Tiger.

Annotation

Booker-winner Penelope Lively's 16th novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of a emotionally fractured family. On the surface, the Harper family was an idyllic one: mother Allison was a doting old-fashioned housewife, and her six children grew up with everything they needed on the large Allersmead estate, their needs tended to by the au pair, Ingrid, who lived at the house for 30 years. Now grown, however, the children have drifted apart, and return home infrequently. In a series of flashbacks and memories, Lively explores the various ways in which the Harper family was not all that it seemed, from the bitterness of Allison and her husband's relationship, to the subtle favoritism they showed their various children, to the children's own unpleasant games, played down in the basement out of the light of day. Though fragmented and mostly plotless, FAMILY ALBUM is an immaculately constructed work of fiction that devilishly dissects the myth of the happy family.

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