I found a copy of Consequences, by Penelope Lively, as I was browsing through Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. The first paragraph was so perfect I had to buy it. I wasn’t disappointed. This short, compressed, jewel-like novel introduces the reader to three generations of a British family, from the 1930s to the present. Lively’s vivid and economic prose captures in a page what other writers take a chapter to convey. She shifts her point of view from character to character, generation to generation, so unerringly that their lives become as authentic as your own.

« Back to Books | Leave a Reply