I read Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively on a reading retreat weekend in a shepherd’s hut on the beach in June, having brought it as a recommended great short novel back in December. It won the Booker Prize in the 1980s and I can absolutely see why. I was captivated from start to finish, read it in a day and stayed up later than I’d meant to, unable to put it down. It really is one of the best books I have read in a long time and I agree with those who argue it should have been a strong contender of the Book of Bookers (and perhaps might have been if women writers were not so easily overlooked).

As protagonist Claudia lays dying in her hospital bed, visited by friends and relatives, she drifts in and out of reminiscences of her life, loves, travels, career, family and war. She explores her close relationship with brother Gordon, her sparring partner, the person she always looks to impress or outdo, the father of her child, Jasper, the only man able to take her on her own terms but completely unsuitable as a life partner, the love of her life, Tom, killed in Egypt in the Second World War (at the same time my grandfather died in the same bit of desert) after all-too-brief a meeting of minds, her daughter, Lisa, to whom she can never bridge the gap between them, and her young friend Laszlo, a Hungarian refugee that Claudia befriends in middle age.

These relationships are so beautifully conjured – they are poignant, alive, bursting with energy, troubled and incredibly real. Claudia herself is flawed, human, unrepenting, determined, ambitious, and deeply likeable throughout. As the end draws near on this life that echoes the history of the twentieth century I held by breath, not wanting her to give her last.