PENELOPE LIVELY (b.1933)
Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. London: Penguin, 1994.
Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively revisits her account of an idyllic childhood in 1930s Egypt. More than just a slice of autobiography, the book is an exploration of childhood perception and the vagaries of memory. At the age of 87, reconsidering a book written at 60, Lively notes ‘much that I have forgotten, but much too that is still familiar […] A good time for anyone, the fifties to sixties – the recurrent crises of youth now distant, the challenges of old age a mere cloud on the horizon’. The majority of the commentary – which totals over 1,800 words across 13 pages, ten of which are on discrete leaves of notepaper taped into the volume – supplements her early life story with additional anecdote, from descriptions of Cairo in the run-up to WWII and on a return visit, to how her archive came to the Harry Ransom Center.

Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial dust jacket.

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