A prolific novelist and short-story writer, Penelope Lively thus far has published more than forty books for children and adults in a writing career spanning a little less than thirty years. In no way, however, has quality been sacrificed for quantity: she has received half a dozen prestigious literary awards, among them the Booker-McConnell Prize, and was named to the Order of the British Empire in 1989 for her contributions to literature.

Lively began her career as a children's novelist, producing eleven critically acclaimed books for young people before publishing her first adult novel, The Road to Lichfield (1977). She has continued to write for both children and adults but has concentrated more and more on adult literature. Such a distinction, however, is in some ways artificial: a definite continuity exists between her children's and her adult fiction and extends also to her two nonfiction books: The Presence of the...