Moon Tiger

Penelope Lively’s timeless, Booker Prize-winning novel explores the shifting nature of reality and identity through the many lives of its narrator.Claudia Hampton, a famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: ‘a history of the world... and in the process, my own’. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt."Moon Tiger is a wide-ranging novel that asks profound philosophical questions about the subjectivity of all experience, the relationship between language and reality, and the construction of history. Lively writes with panache, subverting stodgy conventions of narrative with scrambled chronology, multiple points of view and jumbled tenses." - Moni Mihsin, NPRPenelope Lively was born in Cairo. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. In addition to her many novels, she has published short stories, a memoir of her childhood and an autobiography. She has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012. **SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDEN MAN BOOKER PRIZE** Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world . . . and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire. 'Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away' Anne Tyler 'A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes' Daily Telegraph 'Lively's ability to bring her character and the world she inhabits into full technicolour is beautiful. This is a unique book about a fascinating unpredictable woman way ahead of her time and yet absolutely of her time' Lemn Sissay The elderly Claudia Hampton, a best-selling author of popular history, lies alone in a London hospital bed. Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends. At its center — forever frozen in time, the still point of her turning world — is the cruelly truncated affair with Tom, a British tank commander whom Claudia knew as a reporter in Egypt during World War II. Claudia, a best-selling writer, recalls her life of adventure as a newspaper correspondent, novelist, lover, and mother, while the people close to her file past her hospital bed