Going Back

Behind the gentle, pastel children's cover and between the slim pages of this little book lies a story that is at once small and personal and yet enormous in impact - but enormous is the wrong word, completely the wrong sort of language, there is nothing crude or outsize in this. It is written with elegance and feeling, delicate yet exact, from the opening walk through a garden that mingles childhood memories with adult distance and unspoken experience lost in the mysteries and difficulties of memory.

Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, show more playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.

Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time. show less

Going back is a wonderful novella that transports the reader back to the nostalgia of golden bough of youth when all summers are one hay-making and raspberry-time and lanes tented over with leaves and the tipping hillsides bleached pale where they have cut the corn (p. 52).

Jane goes back to the home where she lived as a seven-year old girl in the English countryside during the Second World War. Among many sweet memories, there's a marring one about running away from home with her brother Edward.

More than the actual visit, Going back is about remembering, bringing back memories of growing up at that special time, and thinking about the people, friends, her brother and especially, also, her father.

Going back was originally conceived as a show more children's book, however, later on Penelope Lively rewrote it for adult readership. Inevitable, on LT the two versions are listed together and tagged as children's literature, as a result of which many readers will miss this precious novella. show less

A sweet story about a wonderful loving relationship between siblings and place. It felt so real I thought it was a memoir. It really touched me. Penelope Lively is a terrific storyteller.