Life in the Garden: A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week 2017

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

• Natural Selection: A Year in the Garden
• The Diary of a Bookseller
• The Lost Words
• Secret Gardeners: Britain's Creatives Reveal Their Private Sanctuaries
• Warlight: A novel
• Head Gardeners
• Farm from Home: A Year of Stories, Pictures, and Recipes from a City Girl in the Country
• Last Stories
• The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
• The Thoughtful Gardener: An Intelligent Approach to Garden Design