How It All Began cover art

How It All Began

A Novel

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

How It All Began

By: Penelope Lively
Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

When Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter, Rose, cannot accompany her employer, Lord Peters, to Manchester, which means his niece, Marion, has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is…just the beginning of the ensuing chain of life-altering events.

In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other, and entire lives to become irrevocably changed.

©2011 Penelope Lively (P)2012 Isis Publishing Ltd Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A Stitch in Time cover art
Children of Chance cover art
Next of Kin cover art
Barbara Pym: A BBC Radio Drama Collection cover art
Elizabeth Jane Howard cover art
Sanctum: A Jake Crowley Adventure cover art
Into the Wilderness cover art
Property of a Noblewoman cover art
Virgins cover art
Deaf Sentence cover art
The Wanderer cover art

Critic reviews

" Whatever your age, How It All Began is a splendid tonic." ( Telegraph)
"A sublime storyteller." ( Guardian)
All stars
Most relevant
Penelope Lively does a very good job with the 'interconnectedness of all things'. The novel is structured with a lot of balance and movement, from person to person, picking up on their changing fortunes and feelings. The story does have you wondering - will they or won't they? It's a gentle story, told at a good pace, a comedy that strikes a chord with life today, particulalrly I suspect for the over-40s!

The reader, Anna Bentinck, does a lovely, lively job with the large and varied cast, with some neat nuances of accent and tone that really brought them to life for me.

I'd recommend this as a very enjoyable listen, light-hearted and engaging.

Amusing, enjoyable, lovely structure

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A good read with lots of dipping in and out of the lives of all these people who make the story come together. Easy to listen to and flows alone nicely. A good story.

How it all began

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Really lovely story about the knock-on effects of one event- the mugging of an elderly woman. The ripples that spread out have far-reaching effects on many people.
Cleverly interwoven and with Lively’s usual flair this is a compelling listen.

The butterfly effect

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
How a single event can trigger a whole chain of other events. This is Penelope Lively at her very best - examining the way peoples' lives are linked together in some sort of web. Excellent portrayal of ageing and memory too. Loved it.

Penelope Lively at her best.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
loved the reading and all the wonderful characterisation by Penelope Lively and acted out so well by Anna Bentinck.

The dialogue - insightful and read brilliantly

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews