Consequences

The Booker Prize-winning author’s first novel since The Photograph is a sweeping saga of three generations of women, their lives, and loves

A chance meeting in St. James’s Park begins young Lorna and Matt’s intense relationship. Wholly in love, they leave London for a cottage in a rural Somerset village. Their intimate life together—Matt’s woodcarving, Lorna’s self-discovery, their new baby, Molly—is shattered with the arrival of World War II. In 1960s London, Molly happens upon a forgotten newspaper—a seemingly small moment that leads to her first job and, eventually, a pregnancy by a wealthy man who wants to marry her but whom she does not love. Thirty years later, Ruth, who has always considered her existence a peculiar accident, questions her own marriage and begins a journey that takes her back to 1941—and a redefinition of herself and of love.

Told in Lively’s incomparable prose, Consequences is a powerful story of growth, death, and rebirth and a study of the previous century—its major and minor events, its shaping of public consciousness, and its changing of lives.