Moon Tiger

I've recently discovered Penelope Lively's fiction. I started with Moon Tiger which won the Booker in 87. I couldn't recommend this book enough. Since then I've been burrowing my way through the rest of her joyfully substantial backlist. Some of my favourite snippets -

'The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.'

'I didn't see him for over four years and by the time I did we had both been jolted into another incarnation of ourselves.'

'We talked. We told each other as much as were ever going to tell. I peered into spaces of his account and he, I suppose, listened to the silences in mine.'

'And what, you may ask me, does that moment in history have to do with me? Life everything else: it enlarges me, it frees me from the prison of my experience; it also resounds within that experience.'