A woman whose lover died moments after ending their affair, the man's grief-stricken wife, and a suspicious insurance investigator collide in the face of deceptions that threaten all of their lives.

Former college sweethearts reconnect decades later after each has married, raised a family and forged careers and embark on an intense affair that forces them to confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.

"While on vacation on an idyllic island called Miden, a seemingly aimless woman meets an attractive man and leaves her country to be with him. A few months later, newly pregnant and just beginning to feel comfortable in her lover's space, her life is upended when a girl arrives at the door. Slight and pretty, the girl discloses a drawn out and violent affair she's had with her professor, the father of the woman's unborn child. In alternating perspectives,...

"One of Britain's most talented and experienced writers. The closer you look the more mystery you see."  —The Times (London)
A seductive and hugely suspenseful novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively, about what can happen when you look too closely into the past
Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many...

"Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote her life to the children and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, Jake. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but make an arrangement...

In the hallucinatory light and heat of a Mediterranean island, London geologist Peter Nicholson arrives to inspect a granite quarry where a worker has died under suspicious circumstances. Hired to write as damning a report as possible, Peter brings his young mistress and pushes his wife and family to the back of his mind. But his blithe plans are disrupted by the arrival of the dead man's widow, hell-bent on revenge; a fax from his wife announcing...

"In the aftermath of her husband's act of adultery and abandonment, Savannah must finally face the ghosts that haunt her and discover for herself whether authentic faith, grace, and ultimate healing really do exist. When her husband of twenty-one years leaves her, Savannah Barrington believes she's lost almost everything she's ever loved. With her daughter in college and her son in boarding school, Savannah retreats to her parents' lake house in the...

"'When they said all happy families are alike, I don't think this is what they meant...' Evelyn Caldwell's husband Nathan has been having an affair - with Evelyn Caldwell. Or, to be exact, with a genetically cloned replica. After a morning that begins with a confrontation and ends with Nathan's body bleeding out on the kitchen floor, the two Caldwell wives will have to think fast-before sharing everything includes sharing a jail cell. The Echo Wife...

In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, it's snowing. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Séan Vallely. Gina remembers their affair: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the falling snow makes the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival of Séan's fragile twelve-year-old daughter - the complication, and gravity, of...

From the last time Linda and Thomas meet, at a charmless hotel in a distant city, to the moment, thirty-five years earlier, when a chance encounter on a rocky beach binds them fatefully together, this hypnotically compelling novel unfolds a tale of intense passion, drama, and suspense. The Last Time They Met is a singularly ambitious and accomplished work by one of today's most widely celebrated novelists.