In A House Unlocked, Whitbread Award- and Booker Prize-winning Penelope
Lively takes us on a journey of her familial country house in England
that her grandparents bought in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room
to room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of
rapid change -- and of the family that changed with the times. As she
charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among
her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the
Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through portraits of the refugees
who came to live with them. A fascinating, intimate social history of
its times, A House Unlocked is an eloquent meditation on place and time,
memory and history, and above all a tribute to the meaning of home.