Spiderweb

All her life Stella Brentwood has considered herself a bird of passage. As an anthropologist she studied social networks but, although she has known love, she remains alone by choice and by chance. Now retired, she has decided to buy a home, to root herself in the Somerset landscape. However, Stella finds life in the West Country as subtle and elaborate a social system as any other she has encountered. She is absorbed by the emotions aroused by new and old relatioships and the hamlet that is now her home proves itself deceptive - an apparently tranquil backwater where the tensions within a dysfunctional family build to a destructive climax. Penelope Lively's novel is a shimmering complext of narrative, letters, journal entries and news items, which spins its own airy web around Stella and her different incarnations.