Consequences

"[Lively's] characters are beguiling, and her blend of romance and stinging social commentary is tonic." -- Booklist Review London, 1935: A chance meeting on a park bench on the eve of World War II sets in motion a love affair that reverberates through three generations. Matt and Lorna are deeply, defiantly, in love; they marry, and Lorna is pregnant when Matt is called for duty. But the war means Matt's death in action; it cuts short his artist's career and changes the course of Lorna's life. The war means that Lorna will marry again and that Molly, their daughter, will grow up in a blasted landscape of bomb sites and boarded windows, of households reconfigured by loss. But a chance look at a forgotten newspaper on the London tube leads Molly into her first job -- and into the life of James Portland, a wealthy man she cannot love; and the postwar period gives way to a new era. Thirty years later, Ruth, Molly's own daughter, leaves her marriage for a journey that takes her back to 1941, to a new resolution of her own history and that of her family. Told in Penelope Lively's incomparable prose, Consequences is a powerful story of growth, death, and renewal, and a study of the previous century -- its major and minor events, the shaping of consciousness and lives, and a reaffirmation of the force of connection between generations. "Lively has crafted a fine novel: intricate, heartbreaking and redemptive." -- Publishers Weekly Penelope Lively is the award-winning author of thirteen previous novels, including Booker Prize winner Moon Tiger and, most recently, the widely acclaimed The Photograph. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She lives in London. Visit her online at www.penelopelively.net. Publishers Weekly named Josephine Bailey Best Female Narrator in 2002. She is the winner of five AudioFile Earphones Awards and most recently won an Audie Award for Best Audio Drama. Her audiobooks include The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields and Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett.