The Road to Lichfield
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3.7 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Man Booker Prize–shortlisted first novel and a "searing study of the peculiar state of being in love" (The Sunday Telegraph).
In The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively explores the nature of history and memory as it is embodied in the life of forty-year-old Anne Linton, who comes to her father's aid when he is moved into a nursing home in a distant town. As she shares his last weeks, she unexpectedly learns that her father had a mistress. With this new knowledge, Linton must examine the realities of her own life—of her childhood, her marriage—and ask, what secrets has she also kept?
Deeply felt and beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, and a future never fully anticipated.
"Like all of Lively's best novels, The Road to Lichfield contains beneath its modest veneer great depths of intelligence, perception and feeling." —The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lively's growing audience of discriminating readers will welcome the belated U.S. publication of her first novel, issued in England in 1977. This quiet but moving book betrays few earmarks of the neophyte: Lively's economical yet evocative use of language, her preoccupation with history as a force in individual lives, and her dry wit are all in evidence here. The year she turns 40, two crises interrupt Anne Linton's orderly routine as the wife of an uncommunicative and slightly boring solicitor, mother of two teenagers, and part-time teacher of history. Her father's terminal illness necessitates her frequent traveling to Litchfield in the Midlands from her Berkshire home, and throws her into contact with schoolmaster David Fielding, with whom she begins an affair. On the surface her existence remains the same, but as she discovers a major secret in her father's life and pursues a clandestine life of her own, she must acknowledge the subjective nature of memories and reassess her own attitudes about the past. She is moved to question her involvement with a group of architectural preservationists who fight the demolition of old buildings, no matter how decrepit and useless, and turn antique artifacts into chic decorative objects. (Lively goes a bit overboard in her portrayal of one character who is obsessed with doing good--``a prettier woman would have taken up adultery''--but her humor has bite.)
