A House Unlocked

Book excerpt: This “interesting and perceptive” memoir recalls the familial country house the author’s grandparents bought in 1923 (The Washington Post Book World). The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents’ country house, Golsoncott. Long after the house was sold out of the family, she begins to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, Lively paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change—and of a family that transformed with the times. Charting the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to light the evidence of the horrors endured during the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through accounts of the refugees who came to live with them. “An elegiac yet resolutely unsentimental book, the house becomes a Rosetta stone for the author’s familial memories and an unwitting index of social change” in this eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and tribute to the meaning of home (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).