Rating: 3 out of 5

Read mainly because it was referred to in an anthology of readings and poems. Not sure if I’ve read any Penelope Lively before. A good, non jarring, writing style. Reasonably well defined characters. But I didn’t find myself caring about them particularly.

Highlighted passages:

saw in his expression the flicker of awkwardness that she generated now all around her. The bereaved are faintly leprous.

No tears, today. The twisting of the guts, at points, but that is standard.

Unhappiness is like being in love: it occupies every moment of every day. It will not be put aside and like love it isolates; grief is never contagious.

Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.

I don’t understand death. It’s not a question of raging or refusing to accept; I simply don’t understand it. I don’t understand how a person can go, for ever. How the air-space – for lack of a better term – that person filled is empty; how there is nothing left but a name and some unassociated thoughts.

He was dead; he existed only in recollection; when recollection ceased even that tenuous existence would be gone.

I’m sorry to talk as though I were an invalid, but bereavement is in a way like chronic illness.’

Friendship is the love that is ignored; people don’t theorize about friendship, write poetry about it. It just goes quietly along, sustaining. Passion spends itself – oh my goodness, does passion spend itself – but friendship is always there.

During the early days and weeks of her solitude Frances had come to realize that grief like illness is unstable; it ebbs and flows in tides, it steals away to a distance and then comes roaring back, it torments by deception. It plays games with time and with reality.

Time, that should be linear, had become formless;

Dry-eyed, she proudly noted.

Surely, if believing in God does anything for people, it helps them through things like this?

time mercifully obliterates. Not what happened but what it felt like.’

how old people are depends on what happens to them, not on years.

time is not only to do with months or weeks, it is to do with feelings and what you know and who you are. Time eats you up;

Originally posted to my Goodreads account