Life In The Garden

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is in part a memoir of her life in gardening, starting with the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home that she lives in today.

It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.