Penelope Lively has been a prolific writer since the appearance of her first book in 1970. Some of her books for children have already been called classics, and her more recent novels for adults have also been highly acclaimed. Britain's highest award for children's literature, the Carnegie Medal, was given to Lively for The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe (1973) in 1974, and her second adult novel, Treasures Of Time (1979), was the winner of Great Britain's first National Book Award for fiction in 1980.

Her theme is often the lasting mystery of the flow of time. Again and again her books show her concern with the continuity of the past into the present, and the subtle relation between collective memory (history) and personal memory. She has always been interested in the jumbled layers of history in the English landscape, where "sixteenth century cottages sprout television aerials and a medieval barn bears graffitti celebrating...