This is one of her remarkable ones, a deserving Booker prize winner in 1987.

Claudia is near the end of her life, reflecting on her past as she lies in her hospital bed. She has been a war journalist and a popular historian, ruffling academic feathers with her often contentious, emotive, books, and not giving a hoot. She mulls over ideas for her next book, a complete history of the world with “life and colour, add screams and rhetoric” from the perspective of some soup, or an ammonite perhaps?.

Unconventional in her being and her desires, Claudia, with her beauty and complexity, has been a source of fascination for men throughout her life. 

“…Jasper, who has known Claudia now eight months and nine days, struggles furiously with his feelings. She maddens him; she is the most interesting woman he has ever met; he would gladly be without her; he cannot wait to be in bed with her again.”

Lively stirs up a glittering kaleidoscope of chronology and perspective. We see key incidents from the viewpoint of each participant, with second- and third-person narrators drifting in to add shade and context at the most human of levels as the tide of history scours the surface of the earth, relentlessly reshaping the personal and global landscapes. There are no section/voice change delineations, the voices flow into and through each other from one paragraph to the next, grains of evidence spilling up through the implacable grind of time, like the bones, shards, and fossils in the strata of an archaeological dig.  

All of this Lively brings us with a devastating emotional weight and clarity. Beautiful, intricate and moving, this is a bejewelled clockwork heart of a book.