(Viking, $27)
Penelope Lively’s “fresh and charming” new novel begins unexpectedly, with the mugging of its protagonist, said Heller McAlpin in The Washington Post. As a thug absconds with her purse, 77-year-old Charlotte Rainsford is sent to the pavement, breaking her hip. But this is no crime thriller. When Charlotte is forced to convalesce in her daughter’s home, the mugging becomes “the stone cast into the placid waters” of the victim’s previous self-sufficiency. The result is one of Lively’s “funniest and most enjoyable character studies” in years, said Alfred Hickling in the London Guardian. The mugging starts a chain reaction, affecting the lives of several well-drawn characters, notably Charlotte’s daughter, a “pompous bubble of self-esteem” named Lord Peters, and an immigrant accountant whom Charlotte tutors. Their individual stories all “momentarily collide” to form “the kind of narrative at which Lively excels: the untidy, unpredictable one in which everyone lives ambivalently ever after.”
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