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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.
"A powerful, moving and beautifully wrought novel about the ways in which lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past." —Boston Globe
"Lively belongs to a chort of brilliant female novelists who defined the fiction culture of postwar Britain ... [Moon Tiger is] an elegant disquisition on memory, identity, age, love, and regret." —Financial Times
"It pulls us in; it engages us and saddens us. It is also unexpectedly funny ... It leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away." —The New York Times Book Review
"A superb and unusually gifted writer ... [She has] an extraordinary facility with words, structural and narrative daring, and imagery so apposite it can make your heart ache. " —The Guardian
This information about Moon Tiger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt and spent her childhood there. She came to England at the age of twelve, in 1945, and went to boarding school in Sussex. She subsequently read Modern History at St. Anne's College, Oxford. In 1957 she married Jack Lively (who died in 1998). They had two children, Josephine and Adam. Jack Lively's academic career took the family from Swansea to Sussex and Oxford, and eventually to Warwick University, where he was Professor of Politics.
Lively received the Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger and wide acclaim for The Photograph and How It All Began. Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. In recognition of her contributions to British literature, she has been appointed Dame Commander ...
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