Penelope Lively books

Anthologies

Chapter Reading Order

Collections

Fanny Reading Order

Gillian Cross Collections

Non-Fiction

Picture Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Penelope Lively is a British author with a career spanning over fifty years and more than seventy published books. She began writing children’s fiction in 1970 with Astercote and won the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973. Her children’s books explore history, place, and memory, themes that carried into her adult fiction when she shifted focus in the late 1970s.

Her adult novels earned wide acclaim. The Road to Lichfield (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Moon Tiger (1987), a novel about a dying historian reconstructing her life, won it. Lively continued to publish novels, short story collections, and memoirs through the 2020s, with works like How It All Began (2011) and the essay collection Life in the Garden (2017). Her non-fiction includes Oleander, Jacaranda (1994), a memoir of her childhood in Egypt, and Ammonites & Leaping Fish (2013), a reflection on aging and memory.

Lively’s bibliography also includes picture books, chapter books for younger readers, and several edited anthologies. She was made a CBE in 2001 and a DBE in 2012. Her work is characterized by its attention to the way the past shapes the present, whether in a children’s ghost story or an adult novel about family and loss.