Consequences

Categories Fiction

The lives of three generations of women are the fodder for British writer Penelope Lively’s latest rich and subtle work of fiction, Consequences.

Lorna, the diffidently rebellious daughter of well-to-do parents, sits weeping on a London park bench in 1935 after yet another pointless argument with her socially ambitious and conventional mother. 

Matt Faraday is sketching nearby for a series of woodcuts he is working on.  (Art college was his path out of a working-class life in a Welsh village.) 

Their meeting leads to an unconventional marriage, launching a family quiet unlike the one either was born into.  World War II, which cuts short their life together, brings changes to British society that make their descendants’ lives in turn unimaginably different from their own.  But the bonds of love and family transcend the generations.