Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom.

In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’ villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories in Penelope Lively’s first story collection in decades reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery and even retribution --- as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap.

DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES traces the arc of Penelope Lively’s life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain’s 20th century. She reflects on her early love of archaeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands.

When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike.