Penelope Lively's 6 favorite books

The Booker Prize-winning author shares her reading tips with nods to Henry James and William Golding

Penelope Lively

What Maisie Knew by Henry James (Penguin, $12). James’s 1897 novel shows adult duplicity through the eyes of a child who does not understand what she is seeing—but you, the reader, do, because you are looking over her shoulder. You feel complicit, and even guilty.

The Inheritors by William Golding (Mariner, $13). This 1955 work is Golding’s most startling book, even more startling than its predecessor, Lord of the Flies. In this novel, a group of Neanderthals watch the arrival of our Homo sapiens ancestors... and are eventually exterminated by them. The Inheritors is about innocence, and the nature of evil, and it has the saddest ending of any novel I know.

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