The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
