Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story o
f loss and desire, published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Cla
udia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to
the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world...and
in the process, my own'.
And it is her story from a childhood just after the
First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined wi
th others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak,
to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasp
er, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter;
and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt.
