Penelope Lively, "Moon Tiger"

     There was an article I read somewhere about Penelope Lively, an English author, and it was suggested that her work had been overlooked. She had certainly passed me by, probably because she seems to have done her best work in the 'eighties. She is now 83 herself, and she has recently published a book that includes a couple of excellent essays on memory and on the changes she has seen over the years in England. When I googled her, I was puzzled by the fact that there seem to be two titles to the same book--'Ammonites and the Dancing Fish,'  or 'The Leaping Fish and Ammonites.' Maybe the same book published under different titles in the US and Britain. Whatever the exact title, which I forget, I read the first two essays with great interest, but I did not read the rest of the book, which seemed to be more evocations of her life prompted by objects she has around her house, including ammonites. But I did see that she won the Booker Prize in 1987 for her novel "Moon Tiger," and the Penguin edition was easily obtainable for a few dollars from AbeBooks.
     Claudia Hampton is dying, and the novel takes us back over her life--her intense relationship with her brother, Gordon; her pregnancy, the birth and upbringing of Lisa, her daughter: her on- and-off affair with Jasper, the father of Lisa; and the highpoint of her career as a war correspondent in Egypt during the Second World War, when she met the love of her life. The writing is great and the story compelling and it kept me reading to the end. But, like "The Little Red Chairs," the sort of coda--her life after that highpoint in Egypt--did seem to pall a little as the scenes from her later life lacked the urgency and interest of the earlier chapters. 
     But, all in all, a very good read