The Photograph

This book was so difficult to swallow. It was incredibly unending and repetitive. It is only the 3rd book in my life I have not been able to finish and I have read as many as 10 books a day. It was worse than wading through molasses. I finally decided that the inner monologue or singular narration was just too much to take for any longer and that the little snippits of conversation were not enough to salvage it. So, I finally stopped with Chapter 3.

I could not finish reading the book. There was just something about it that I could not get interested in.

My second experience of Penelope Lively and though I quite liked aspects of this book it was also a confirmation that she's never going to be one of my favourite authors. The novel has an interesting hook - a husband stumbles upon a group photo in which his dead wife is covertly holding hands with h......more

After his wife’s death Glyn finds a photograph of her covertly holding the hand of her sister’s husband. What follows is a narrative investigating how fundamentally unknowable everyone is. Glyn confronts his wife’s sister with the photograph and all of a sudden various people who thought they had pe......more