Moon Tiger

By: Penelope Lively

Narrated by: Ruth Urquhart

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

Penelope Lively won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel.

Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she's carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt.

Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia's personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia's impact on their world.

©1987 Penelope Lively (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

wonderful

Brilliant writing, innovative style. This is the way the human mind works, recollecting events in random style, back and forth over the years. The narration is superb. It is rare on Audible to hear an actor who inhabits the characters so thoroughly and captures the language of children through late adulthood.

Excellent story marred by performance

One of my biggest pet peeves is audiobook narrators who don't do their homework in learning the correct pronunciations of words, particularly proper names, in the books they record. In this case the Yugoslavian dictator Tito (tee-to) was rendered as Tie-to; the U.S. state of Iowa became ee-OH-wa, and any French word including the diphthong "oi" (pronounced "wah," as in Miss Piggy's "moi") became OY, to name but a few. I did think the reader's choices of voice for different characters was generally quite well done.
The book itself is very fine, as the recollections at the end of life of a strong and independent woman who, when gutted by the loss of her great love, becomes yet stronger and more independent in her relations with her family.

I LOVED THIS STORY !

This is a powerful, beautiful, haunting and real work. The narrator is excellent and brings the already vivid characters to the life they deserve in the listening. I must admit I was first drawn to the title of the book and the beauty of the cover, but am so glad for that. In a world without enough ways for celebrating strong women, this story adds another level of exploration. I was mesmerized. When the story ended I wanted more. Do not miss this one !

LOVED THIS BOOK, POOR NARRATION

Usually when the narration of a book is this bad, I don't bother to finish the audiobook. However, this is such a wonderful book and I have so little time to sit in a chair and read I was forced to finish the audiobook despite how the narrator grated on me. I'm so glad I was able to do so. This is SUCH A WONDERFUL MEANINGFUL book and I enjoyed it so much. I have a paperback copy and I look forward to reading it in two weeks on a long eight hour flight I have planned. However the narrator delivers this test in both a singsong and breathless voice for the main character that is so annoying it really took me quite a while to get beyond how poorly done it was. This is the first time I have read Penelope Lively although I have been meaning to do so for years and have a number of her books awaiting my attention on shelves. Hopefully some of the other audiobooks available will have better narrators as well. This particular book won a Booker Prize in 1987 - and one can easily see why, it's a profound and moving memoir of a woman's experience and love told from her deathbed in poetic bursts of memory through other characters and her own thoughts. I had tears in my eyes at the end of the book - I can't wait to read it again and savor it even more.

stunning beauty

intricate description and a veritable dance between the present and the past as a frail woman finds herself as a part of the history of the world.