'The twentieth century shook the world- it sobers me to have been one of those to see it through'

In this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', Penelope Lively, at eighty, reports back on what she finds. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of the key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she's been - fragments of memories from a life well lived.

Ten years on, Lively returns to the same questions in a new chapter, On Being Ninety, included in this new edition.