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    The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
    The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
    The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

    Written by Penelope Lively

    Narrated by Davina Porter

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author of How It All Began In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings. In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius's villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. "Abroad" captures the low point of an artist couple's tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery, and even retribution-as in "The Third Wife," when a woman learns her husband to be a serial con artist and turns a house hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap. Each of these delightful stories is elevated by Lively's signature graceful prose and eye for the subtle yet powerfully evocative detail. Wry, charming, and keenly insightful, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 9, 2017
    ISBN9781501946172
    The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
    Author

    Penelope Lively

    Penelope Lively is a novelist, short story writer and author of children's books. Her novels have won several literary awards including the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987, the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973, and the Whitbread Award for A Stitch in Time in 1976.

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    Reviews for The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

    4/5

    36 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I have loved much of Lively's work, so was delighted to lay hands on this new collection of short stories. She is of a certain generation of British women writers who produce precisely detailed, coolly observed, underwrought portraits largely of women and their complicated and often unsatisfied lives. I "get" Penelope. These stories, though, feel a bit more like exercises, or trials, rather than full-on examples of her art. Hmm, let's try a ghost story. Check. How about a horror story? Check. (Neither very successful.) How about a historical set piece told from the point of view of a purple swamp hen (narrated, actually, by the male bird...)? Not bad, rather fun. I got a little weary of the longing-for-a-child theme in several stories. As I was reading, I found I was paying more attention to how she was doing the writing than the story itself - not that that's a bad thing, if you want to study a fine writer's techniques! The best of the bunch was "Biography," assembled as a series of interview transcripts interspersed with the interviewees' private thoughts on the person under discussion. Cleverly wrought, multiple different voices and points of view deftly handled, with a painful ending... but even there, the tricks of the structure and approach stole some thunder from the emotional impact. You can't go wrong reading Penelope Lively, but this is perhaps not her best.
    • 4/5
      Penelope Lively is a new writer to me and that is a surprise as the list of her works is quite long. Also, and this attracted me, she is a Booker Prize winner. This collection of short stories is wide ranging and quite varied. There are even a few 'horror' entries, but mostly the events described within these pages concern moods and impressions and the inner workings of the mind.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful, cohesive collection of short stories with engaging characters and intelligent wit. Have loved her writing for years and she continues to dazzle in her eighties.
    • 5/5
      Penelope Lively is an author with a subtle and delightful sense of humor and pathos. She has written more than 20 novels and short story collections. Her latest collection, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is every bit engrossing as many of the others I have read. Penelope was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1933. She is a British Citizen and has been awarded the title of “Dame of the British Empire.” She won the Booker Prize in 1987 for her acclaimed novel, Moon Tiger. She is a sure bet for a great read.The collection begins with the title story, "The Purple Swamp Hen." The story is told by a Purple Swamp Hen, and it is rather humorous. Penelope begins with a detailed description—including taxonomy—of the hen. She writes, “Wondering where all this is going? Have patience. You know me on the famous garden fresco from Pompeii—somewhat faded, a travesty of my remarkable plumage, but nevertheless a passable portrait. You all exclaim over those frescos: the blues and greens, the precise depiction of flora and fauna. Oh, look! You cry—there are roses, and ferns, oleanders, poppies, violets. And oh! There’s a pigeon, a jay, a swallow, a magpie. You don’t cry—oh! A Purple Swamp Hen, because the vast majority of you can’t recognize one. You eye me with vague interest and pass on. It’s just like a garden today! You cry” (1). I googled this peculiar bird and found it quite beautiful. I crowned this story as my favorite—until the next couple of stories.Another favorite soon appeared. “A Biography” begins with a brief obituary of Lavinia Talbot. In an effort to document the woman’s life, someone began questioning her friends and relatives. Alice Hobbs is the first interviewee. Alice mentions her as an acquaintance. When the interview is over, Alice reflects on the information she left out of the interview. Penelope writes, “Yes, actually I’d rather go back to our childhood. After all, that’s when I knew her best. I remember the latter part most, when I was—oh, nine, ten—and she was a teenager. Except there weren’t teenagers then, they hadn’t been invented—people that age were just in a sort of limbo, waiting to be grown up. But Lavinia somehow refused that, she was very much established, very much already a person, helping Mum out at family gatherings—our mother was lovely, of course, but she wasn’t an organizer, things could fall apart, and Lavinia would step in and see the table got laid and the food got served, all that. And she wasn’t shy, like I was, she could find something to say to grownups, carry on a conversation. Goodness, I remember her with Uncle Harry, our cousin Barbara’s father, holding her own like anything in an argument about—oh, something political, I think. And he got all ruffled—she was getting the better of him maybe—and told her she was still wet behind the ears. She made that into a great joke, after—always saying, ‘I must be careful to dry my ears if Uncle Harry’s going to be here’” (57). As you will see while reading, she was a great fan of hyphenated sentences. She has six in this paragraph. Penelope Lively has a wonderful sense of dry English humour. The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories might take a bit of reading to adapt to her style, but it is more than worth the effort. 5 stars
    • 5/5
      Extremely well crafted. I wonder why I bother reading novels when there are authors like Penelope Lively who can put so much into ten or twenty pages, telling all I need to know and everything that happened.