Consequences

Consequences is a love-story-times-three that opens on the eve of the Second World War, with a chance meeting in St. James's Park, London. Told in Lively's incomparable prose, it is a powerful story of growth, death, and rebirth and a study of the previous century—-its major and minor events, its shaping of public consciousness, and its changing of lives.

New York Times Book Review

Joyous . . . At its center shimmers the idea of . . . the continuity of humankind as embodied in one family, shattered and reconstituted, fragile, stubborn, endearing.

Beloved memoirist (A House Unlocked), children's book author (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe), and Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively is perhaps best known for smart, literate thrillers that look to the past for keys to understanding, like 2003's The Photograph. "I'm not an historian," Lively told Britain's The Observer, "but I can get interested -- obsessively interested -- with any aspect of the past."