Passing On is the eighth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.
Helen is fifty-two and Edward forty-nine when Dorothy, their mother, dies, ending her reign of terror and leaving them ill-equipped to deal with their lives. Timid, cautious and naive, Helen makes the charming Giles Carnaby, familiy solicitor, the object of a belated schoolgirl crush, while Edward, free to express his sexuality at last, finds it gets the better of him. Dorothy may be dead and buried, but her iron grip continues to hold them in its power.
'Passing On is about the essential difficulty of being English, of coping with peculiarly English varieties of guilt, nostalgia, frustration and desire' Observer
'Lively is at her sharpest, alert to every conceivable irony' Jonathan Coe, Guardian
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
Industry Reviews
Lively's eighth novel, superior in delicacy of tone and craft, views a contemporary "brutal world" of rampaging greed through the gentle, spare, vulnerable lives of a sister and brother who persist in not taking account of its dangers or excesses. Horrid, bullying Dorothy, mother of Helen, 52, Edward, 49, and Louise 43, has at last expired at age eighty. Dorothy's death, muses Helen, who lives with brother Edward in Greystones - the moldering huge house that Dorothy has left to a nephew in order to save taxes - has left a "black hole." From the unkempt garden to the kitchen (redolent of rotting dishcloths), Helen, a part-time librarian in the Cotswold village, constantly meets Mother's punishing presence. Both Helen and Edward, a mild-mannered schoolteacher and rabid conservationist, are dowdy, honest as rain, and quietly shelter within themselves years of hurt and anxiety. In the meantime, sister Louise - stressed by career and marriage and her two teen-agers (to Helen's amusement, the teens were "black-leathered and slung about with chains" at the funeral) - urges improving comforts at ill-heated Greystones. But Helen and Edward agree: "so far as money and possessions are concerned, we're at a more primitive stage than the rest. We're not interested in surplus." But Helen and Edward are about to become victims of disastrously belated releases of desires and yearnings. Both will survive loss, fear, and horror - to attain what Helen recognizes as "an interesting sense of the future. A sense that things can be done: by me, by Edward." And the magnetic "black hole" that was the dead Dorothy is no more. An exquisitely patterned and witty tribute to pacific souls indecently victimized - who "make do" firmly through psychic crises in a world of "making it." (Kirkus Reviews)
