Moon Tiger

Moon Tiger is a novel by the British writer Penelope Lively, published in 1987. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it spans the period before, during and after the Second World War.

Claudia Hampton is seventy-six and terminally ill. She is a professional historian and a writer of popular history, and she spends her last days in and out of consciousness imagining a history of the world; what she produces instead is her own history, told in her own voice.

Her earliest memories are of a father who died in the First World War and of the summer of 1920, when she was ten and competing with her eleven-year-old brother Gordon for fossils. Claudia and Gordon are rivals, lovers and best friends at different points in their lives, and the novel moves backward and forward between Egypt, London and the years between the wars to show a woman who insisted on being recognised as free and independent. The story is told from several points of view, and none of them is allowed to have the last word.