A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively.

Check RCPL Catalog

If you like Maeve Binchy, try Penelove Lively.  “Lively’s crisp and savvy fiction is intimately tied to place, an orientation she uses with exceptional vision in this fine weave of family and world history. Lively’s base of operations is Golsoncott, her grandmother’s west Somerset Edwardian country home and the site of many unexpected alliances. Her aunt Rachel was an artist who defied all notions of genteel womanhood, and it was she who transformed Golsoncott into a war nursery during the Blitz, filling it with evacuated children from London’s worst slums, an event that prompts Lively to handily dissect the class system. A displaced Russian widow also found sanctuary at Golsoncott, and Lively’s account of her harrowing experiences encapsulates the entire wretched story of Russia’s epic suffering, just as her profile of the Holocaust refugee who lived at Golsoncott illuminates the plight of exiled Jews. Lively not only uses ‘the private life of a house . . . to bear witness to the public traumas’ of the twentieth century but she also offers incisive, witty, and unfailingly sensitive observations about change and stasis in women’s lives.” – Booklist