From Publishers Weekly
Lively likes historians. Her most famous novel on this side of the Atlantic, the Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, told the story of a popular historian; her latest narrates the quest of a "landscape historian" in search of what Proust called "lost time": the living past of his dead wife. Glyn Peters, a famous British archeologist, discovers a compromising photograph of his wife, Katherine Targett, sealed in an envelope in a closet at home. Peters specializes in excavating the long defunct gardens, buried fields and covered-over roads of the British landscape. Reverting to professional habits, he treats Kath's infidelity as a sort of archeological dig. The photo depicts Kath and Nick Hammond, the husband of Kath's sister, Elaine, surreptitiously holding hands on some outing, with Elaine and Mary Packard, Kath's best friend, in the background. Glyn decides to interview this cloud of witnesses, beginning with Elaine. Elaine is a successful, and somewhat cold, landscaper; Nick, her polar opposite, is a man one degree away from being a Wodehouse dilettante. Lively, who is never shy of letting us know her opinion of her characters (like Trollope), makes her disapprobation of Nick plain. Elaine, after learning of the affair, kicks Nick out. He takes refuge with Polly, their daughter, in London, and goes rapidly downhill. Glyn, meanwhile, has searched out Nick's ex-business partner, Oliver Watson, who took the photograph, and Mary Packard. Lively is always a discerning, keenly intelligent writer. This, for instance, is how she describes, in three irrevocable words, Elaine's pregnancy: "She is pregnant: heavy, hampered, irritable." Unfortunately, Kath, a demon-haunted beauty with little depth, remains unconjurable. Her insubstantiality and the much-foreshadowed nature of her death, not revealed until late in the novel, drains this story of its full emotional impact.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
While searching through a closet, Glyn discovers a photograph of his wife, Kath, secretly holding hands with her brother-in-law. He can't demand an explanation, for Kath has been dead for a year. Instead, he sets out to query all who knew her, thereby unleashing a cascade of unintended consequences. This thoughtful story by the exquisitely talented English novelist Penelope Lively is about how little we attend to the people we purport to love. It's a book with a surface calm and an undercurrent of tension. Husband and wife narrators Gerroll and Kalember read adequately, even well sometimes, yet overall, they are too affected by the story's apparent placidity. They both employ an uninflected tone and do not differentiate between voices. One doesn't want drama, just some sense of engagement. Then again, the book is about how distant we are from each other, so perhaps they're just right. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In Booker Prize winner Lively's stunning novels, the past and present form a yin-yang-like balance, and her keen and agitated characters fall into two camps. One, comprising dogged professionals, is obsessed with imposing order on life, and is driven mad by the other, which consists of more sensitive and improvisatory souls, such as Kath, the dead woman at the center of this elegant yet electrifying tale. As the reader wonders about the nature of Kath's death, Lively, a master of the whip-crack phrase and arch and dissecting humor, craftily reveals the culpability of Kath's survivors: her ambitious husband, Glyn, a renowned landscape historian who can discern subtle evidence of ancient forts yet remains oblivious to his wife's emotions; Kath's frosty older sister, Elaine, a hugely successful garden designer; and Elaine's once "beguiling" now "exasperating" husband, Nick. Kath returns to haunt these smug souls after Glyn finds an incendiary photograph that calls into question everything this little coterie thought they knew about themselves and each other. As lovely but lonely Kath comes into ever sharper focus through the lens of each character's increasingly stressed consciousness, Lively offers provocative musings on work, obsession, the burden of beauty, alienation of affections, and the endless longing for love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, TV history man Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen. Taken in high summer, many years before, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man." "Glyn's work as a historian should have inured him to unexpected findings and reversals, but he is ill-prepared for this radical shift in perception. His mind fills with questions. Who was the man? Who took the photograph? Where was it taken? When? Who else knew? Had Kath planned for him to find out all along?" As Glyn begins to search for answers, he and those around him find the certainties of the past and present slipping away, and the picture of the beautiful woman they all thought they knew well distorts, changes, grows mistier.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Penelope Lively's engaging new novel, The Photograph, is a testament to the virtues of lightness. Though her subject is not light -- it is in fact death, and the hold the dead have upon the living -- her method is subtraction, lightness, the quick, telling stroke. In this, her 13th novel, Lively, winner of numerous awards (including the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger), tempers sprightly enthusiasm with perfect command of the form. — Valerie Martin

The Washington Post

The Photograph is one of Lively's most satisfying novels: cleverly conceived, artfully constructed and executed with high intelligence and sensitivity. It is also a surprisingly suspenseful story, with developments unfolding in two directions, as Glyn and the other characters find out new things about a past they thought they knew and as their radically altered perceptions and feelings continue to sway their relationships. Lively has exceeded herself in her portrayal of these characters. Not only has she created a cast of memorably distinctive and believably complex individuals, but she has also succeeded in the subtle and difficult task of showing us how their feelings and conceptions are being transformed, both by the revelations about the past and by their ongoing, sometimes painful, encounters with each other in the present. — Merle Rubin

The New Yorker

Scrounging around in a cupboard stuffed with three decades' worth of papers and academic debris, Glyn Peters, a recently widowed landscape historian, discovers an envelope marked "Don't Open-Destroy" in his late wife's handwriting. Is there anyone on earth who would obey such an injunction? Certainly not Glyn, who opens the envelope to find a photograph of his beautiful, feckless wife hand in hand with her sister's husband. Determined to understand his wife's affair, he delves into her past with a historian's tenacity and a good deal more interest in her than he managed to muster while she was alive. This search branches out to encompass a small circle of friends, all of whom have a share in the narration. But Lively doesn't stop there, and her characters' questions about the dead woman provoke questions about themselves and the roles they played in her life.

Publishers Weekly

Lively likes historians. Her most famous novel on this side of the Atlantic, the Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger, told the story of a popular historian; her latest narrates the quest of a "landscape historian" in search of what Proust called "lost time": the living past of his dead wife. Glyn Peters, a famous British archeologist, discovers a compromising photograph of his wife, Katherine Targett, sealed in an envelope in a closet at home. Peters specializes in excavating the long defunct gardens, buried fields and covered-over roads of the British landscape. Reverting to professional habits, he treats Kath's infidelity as a sort of archeological dig. The photo depicts Kath and Nick Hammond, the husband of Kath's sister, Elaine, surreptitiously holding hands on some outing, with Elaine and Mary Packard, Kath's best friend, in the background. Glyn decides to interview this cloud of witnesses, beginning with Elaine. Elaine is a successful, and somewhat cold, landscaper; Nick, her polar opposite, is a man one degree away from being a Wodehouse dilettante. Lively, who is never shy of letting us know her opinion of her characters (like Trollope), makes her disapprobation of Nick plain. Elaine, after learning of the affair, kicks Nick out. He takes refuge with Polly, their daughter, in London, and goes rapidly downhill. Glyn, meanwhile, has searched out Nick's ex-business partner, Oliver Watson, who took the photograph, and Mary Packard. Lively is always a discerning, keenly intelligent writer. This, for instance, is how she describes, in three irrevocable words, Elaine's pregnancy: "She is pregnant: heavy, hampered, irritable." Unfortunately, Kath, a demon-haunted beauty with little depth, remains unconjurable. Her insubstantiality and the much-foreshadowed nature of her death, not revealed until late in the novel, drains this story of its full emotional impact. 5-city pre-pub tour. (June 2) Forecast: Lively has strong name recognition, but her sales on this side of the Atlantic continue to be modest. Her latest is unlikely to break the mold, but her steady, reliable output (this is her 13th novel) should help keep her on readers' radar screens. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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