As she charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust, through portraits of the refugees who came to live with them.

As her narrative moves from room to room, from object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change and of the family that changed with the times. Whitbread Award and Booker Prize winning Penelope Lively is one of England’s greatest living writers, whom The New York Times Book Review has called ‘blessed…Īble to render matters of great import with a breath, a barely audible sigh, a touch.’ In A House Unlocked, Lively bridges personal and social history in telling the story of Golsoncott, the country house in Somerset, England, that her grandparents bought in 1923. How will independent minded Stella, always reluctant to make an emotional commitment, respond?Written in exquisitely nuanced prose, Spiderweb is a captivating and deeply moving novel, a brilliant vision of our modern experience. An old friend, an archaeologist, poignantly seeks her out for companionship. Her neighbors turn out to be dangerously violent and unstable family, a threat to the entire community as well as Stella herself. Her oldest friend’s husband, now widowed, is interested in something more than friendship with her. In Somerset, Stella once again finds an opportunity to become part of the web of relationships that make for human society. She has spent her life studying communities of peopletheir families, social structures, how they welcomed outsiders into their midstremaining an observer, privileged to share in their intimate life but not obliged, and finally unwilling, to tie herself closely to any lover, friend or social group. The drama of life in the West Country alternates with Stella’s powerfully vivid memories of lovers, friends, and her anthropological sojourns in such exotic places as the Nile Valley in Egypt, the island of Malta, and among farmers in the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. At age sixty five, retired anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in Somerset, England, and slowly acquires neighbors, a dog, and a professional curiosity about the country village where she intends to settle and put down roots for the first time.

A stitch in time lively novel