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Perfect Happiness is the fifth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. Frances, happily married for many years, and suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steve has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonizingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth-century - death and grief. 'A triumph' Spectator 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.… (more)
A moving and eloquent illumination of the quintessential question, "What is happiness"? Based on a young widow's experience, the author explores grief and the road through mourning, and where the concept of being comparatively happy can wind up being a solace. Penelope Lively is particularly accomplished in conveying the philosophical development of complex emotions. ( )
She had given him some guidance about indexing, of which she apparently had experience, and he had tried to give the impression of taking note while searching for some way to ensure another meeting. Consequently, he could no longer remember what she had said about indexing.
Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.
Frances saw in his expression the flicker of awkwardness that she generated now all around her. The bereaved are faintly leprous.
When you have been in the habit of expectation, of dangerous and excessive expectation, and when planning, fruitless planning, has been the practice of a lifetime, and when such habits are arbitrarily broken, a substitute is necessary.
[Books] could not explain the shocking truth that when someone you love dies they cease to be there any more in a way that is barely credible, or that happiness scarcely gives you time to know it for what it is or that unhappiness is pain.
Last words
She drove towards her house, neither happy nor grieving, looking not backwards into the day but on into the next.
Perfect Happiness is the fifth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. Frances, happily married for many years, and suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steve has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonizingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth-century - death and grief. 'A triumph' Spectator 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.
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The story begins eight months after the sudden death of Frances's husband, and tells of her continuing to grieve through the next five months, until she can tell herself, "I am hitched, again, to time and to the world".
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