Cleopatra's Sister: A Novel

A paleontologist by choice - and perhaps also due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on Blue Anchor Beach on the north Somerset coast when he was six years old - Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for a Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is embarked on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that bring love and can take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives. The imaginary country of Callimbia, which lies between Egypt and Libya on the Mediterranean Sea, has its own history whose narrative unfolds alongside those of Howard and Lucy in the first half of Penelope Lively's new novel. Callimbia's existence depends on an alternative account of ancient history in which the charismatic Berenice, sister of Cleopatra, flees Egypt to escape execution and eventually takes over the throne of neighboring Callimbia. Berenice's subsequent adventure with Antony, her sister's lover, and indeed the history of Callimbia down through the ages are no less real, perhaps, than the stories representing Howard's and Lucy's respective pasts in our own era. All three narratives converge in the second half of Cleopatra's Sister, which takes place in modern-day Marsopolis, the capital of Callimbria. The suspenseful tale of what happens to the British passengers of Capricorn Flight 500, at the mercy of a capricious new ruler in violence-torn Callimbia, illustrates yet again the randomness of events that make up both history and a human being's life. That Howardand Lucy find each other in Marsopolis is no more or less fateful than Howard's finding that piece of ammonite on Blue Anchor Beach many years earlier. Indeed, one event would never have happened without the other. While the past has always seemed to haunt the present in Penelope Lively's novels - from the Booker Prizewinning Moon Tiger to the more recent City of the Mind - her newest book explores the role of choice and contingency in human life and in the stories we construct about our lives and the world. With the intelligence, gracefulness, and gentle irony we have come to expect of Penelope Lively's fiction, Cleopatra's Sister illuminates the age-old dance of myth and reality in a novel that sparkles with wit, humor, and keen insight into the story-telling faculty of the human mind.