The Photograph

Booker Prize—winning novelist Penelope Lively's latest masterpiece opens with a snapshot: Kath, before her death, at an unknown gathering, holding hands with a man who is not her husband. The photograph is in an envelope marked “DON'T OPEN— DESTROY.” But Kath's husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secrets—within marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her— and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched.

Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.

The New York Times

Penelope Lively's engaging new novel, The Photograph, is a testament to the virtues of lightness. Though her subject is not light -- it is in fact death, and the hold the dead have upon the living -- her method is subtraction, lightness, the quick, telling stroke. In this, her 13th novel, Lively, winner of numerous awards (including the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger), tempers sprightly enthusiasm with perfect command of the form. — Valerie Martin

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."