Family Album
This is a subject which Penelope Lively explores in her 16th novel, the tale of a shabbily genteel upper-middle class family and the house that has played witness to their lives and stored their secrets. Now grown-up, one by one the emotionally distant children return, less than enthusiastically, to their former home and their almost fanatically-nurturing mother and distant writer father.
Lively is somewhat of a literary heavyweight but I initially found her mannered style hard to get used to and her tendency to jump between different tenses and first and third person narratives within a paragraph quite off-putting. However, after a while I hardly noticed the pages flying by, a testament to Lively’s ability to weave a quietly compelling tale from a slight enough plot.
