From Publishers Weekly
Surely this authoritatively controlled, highly accomplished novel, British author Lively's 10th (her Moon Tiger won the Booker), will increase her audience of discriminating readers here. Written with grace and clarity, and luminous with insights about the human condition, it is as timely as the evening news and as eternal as the most classic love story. Lively's subtext, the "strange conjunction of likelihood and contingency" that determines one's life, is convincing; she orchestrates a fateful mix of chance encounters, determined by character as well as coincidence. In alternating chapters, she depicts the lives of paleontologist Howard Beamish and crusading journalist Lucy Faulkner, both successful in their careers but unfulfilled because they have not established enduring relationships. They meet when the plane they are taking to Cairo makes a forced landing in Callimbia, a fictional country in the throes of a bloody revolution led by a lunatic dictator. Lively's witty, ironic construction of Callimbia's history ranges from its establishment by Cleopatra's sister Berenice through the rise of the "moral renegade" who orders the plane's British passengers taken hostage. Through the eyes of Howard and Lucy, and in counterpoint to their growing love for each other, Lively depicts the passengers' responses to their plight: from annoyance to growing unease and to terror, as their captors grow more hostile and threatening and the situation turns more bizarre. Lively keeps the narrative deliberately low key while escalating the tension, which culminates when one of the group is singled out to be executed. Against all the conventions of contemporary fiction, Lucy and Howard's mature romance is fresh and convincing--though entirely without scenes of sexual union--and the wonder of love is made all the more clear in contrast to the precarious nature of human existence. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Howard Beamish, hero of Booker Award winner Lively's ingratiating new work, becomes a paleontologist because he is fascinated by the "strange conjunction of likelihood and contingency which is the root of life. " Heroine Lucy, determined to avoid her mother's dreary fate, works hard to become a journalist--but she gets her first important job after she runs into a friend after falling off a bus. Eventually, Lucy lands an assignment in Nairobi, where Howard is also heading, having run across a friend who tells him that the museum there has some choice finds. When the plane carrying both Howard and Lucy makes an emergency landing in Callimbia--an imaginary African country supposedly founded by Cleopatra's sister--the passengers are held hostage by Callimbia's maniacal leader. The crisis is fortunate in one respect: Howard and Lucy meet and fall in love. Perhaps the capriciousness of fate is made too obvious, but Lively handles her story with skill, grace, and invigorating charm; with an economy of words, the terror of the hostages is made palpable. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/92.- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
The separate histories of Howard Beamish, Lucy Faulkner and a mythical country called Callimbia dominate the first part of this delightful book. In the second part all three converge when a plane carrying the two protagonists makes an emergency landing in Callimbia, where a political revolution is taking place. Nadia May delineates each character with slight nuances of speech and pitch. Her warm, witty portrayals of the Callimbians are especially good. The combination of excellent text and wonderful reader makes for an entertaining presentation. S.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews
This latest addition to the Lively oeuvre (The Road to Lichfield, City of the Mind, etc.) is a welcome one--a kind of romance with star-crossed lovers and all, but with a lot more sardonicism than Shakespeare ever vented on Romeo and Juliet. Here, the boy who meets girl is 36-year-old Howard Beamish, a British paleontologist who, after a number of unsatisfactory liaisons, comes to ``have serious doubts about the pair-bonding system,'' and therefore retreats into the ``impartial climate'' of his scientific heartthrob, the Burgess Shale. The girl is Lucy Faulkner, a journalist, who for a number of reasons doesn't let men get too close--chief among them being that her own father flew the coop when she was small. Lively offers periodic check-ins with these two as they approach that moment when they meet and fall in love on a flight to Nairobi that gets grounded in Callimbia, a small African country in the throes of revolution. Interspersed with all this is what the author calls ``A Brief History of Callimbia,'' which follows the nation's course from prehistoric times to the rocky present--all in an effort to show what a dicey enterprise history is, since it cannot tell the whole, true story of events. Meanwhile, the Brits aboard Flight 500 are held hostage by a mad dictator who likes Lucy because she reminds him of his mother; in one particularly funny scene, he forces her to play a board game with him. Lively opts for a happy outcome, though only after a few plot twists that make it clear that the matter of Howard and Lucy in love could very easily have turned out differently. This is amusing in the urbane British way, satiric without ever testing the limits of credibility, larkish but not fluffy--in short, more of the Lively right stuff. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A paleontologist by choice - and perhaps also due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on Blue Anchor Beach on the north Somerset coast when he was six years old - Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for a Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is embarked on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that bring love and can take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives. The imaginary country of Callimbia, which lies between Egypt and Libya on the Mediterranean Sea, has its own history whose narrative unfolds alongside those of Howard and Lucy in the first half of Penelope Lively's new novel. Callimbia's existence depends on an alternative account of ancient history in which the charismatic Berenice, sister of Cleopatra, flees Egypt to escape execution and eventually takes over the throne of neighboring Callimbia. Berenice's subsequent adventure with Antony, her sister's lover, and indeed the history of Callimbia down through the ages are no less real, perhaps, than the stories representing Howard's and Lucy's respective pasts in our own era. All three narratives converge in the second half of Cleopatra's Sister, which takes place in modern-day Marsopolis, the capital of Callimbria. The suspenseful tale of what happens to the British passengers of Capricorn Flight 500, at the mercy of a capricious new ruler in violence-torn Callimbia, illustrates yet again the randomness of events that make up both history and a human being's life. That Howard and Lucy find each other in Marsopolis is no more or less fateful than Howard's finding that piece of ammonite on Blue Anchor Beach many years earlier. Indeed, one event would never have happened without the other. While the past has always seemed to haunt the present in Penelope

FROM THE CRITICS

BookList - Donna Seaman