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Also by Penelope Lively:

Dancing Fish And Ammonites, February 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Consequences, June 2007
Hardcover

DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES
By: Penelope Lively

Viking
February 2014
On Sale: February 6, 2014
224 pages
ISBN: 0670016551
EAN: 9780670016556
Kindle: B00DMCV8CC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir

The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing

“The memory that we live with . . . is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.”

Memory and history have been Penelope Lively’s terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively’s life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain’s twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey—including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - March 17, 2014
All Things Considered - February 10, 2014