How long is it?
224 pages in the Grove Press 1997 paperback edition.
Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 56 / 100High
- Length
- 224 pagesGrove Press · 1997
- Reading time
- 4 h 30 minat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Measured
- Emotional intensity
- 4 / 5
About 4 h 30 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 9 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Claudia Hampton, a historian dying in a London hospital, announces that she is writing a history of the world, but her thoughts return repeatedly to her own life. Childhood rivalry with her brother Gordon and her difficult relationship with her daughter lead back to her work as a war correspondent in Egypt, where she met British tank commander Tom Southern. His place in her memory overshadows her other relationships.
Reader notes
Sharp, opinionated and often funny, Claudia's voice runs through a reflective literary novel about love, loss and the ownership of the past. Scenes recur from different viewpoints, and chronology follows the associations of memory, requiring some adjustment. Sexual relationships are described without graphic detail.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Fragmentary · Lyrical
- Tone
- Intimate · Melancholic · Philosophical · Reflective
- Structure
- Fragmented · Multiple timelines · Nonlinear
- Driven by
- Character · Ideas · Voice
- Point of view
- Multiple viewpoints
- Setting
- Cairo and Egypt · London
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 3 / 5
- Ideas
- 4 / 5
- Structure
- 4 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Grief
- Knowledge and truth
- Love
- Memory
- Mortality
- War
Content notes
- Violence
- Strong
- Sexual content
- Mild
- Swearing
- Mild
- Substance use
- Mild
- Abuse
- Mild
- Self-harm or suicide
- None
Standing and awards
Highly regarded
- Booker Prize, 1987
- Los Angeles Times Book Prizes finalist, 1988
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
Grove Press · 1997 · Paperback. ISBN 9780802135339.
How long does it take to read Moon Tiger?
About 4 hours 30 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 224-page Grove Press edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively is a British writer whose fiction for children and adults repeatedly brings the past into unsettled contact with the present. Her plots often begin with an ordinary disturbance and widen through memory, historical layers, or a revealing object. In the children’s novel The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, an Oxfordshire village and a boy’s new home become sites where seventeenth-century demands intrude on contemporary life, handled with descriptive atmosphere and wit. Her adult fiction uses similarly mobile structures. Moon Tiger moves through a historian’s recollections without conventional chronology, while The Photograph follows the revisions set in motion by an image that unsettles a family’s account of itself.
If you liked this
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Literary fiction
Edition and details
- Publisher
- Grove Press
- Publication year
- 1997
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 224
- ISBN
- 9780802135339
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 1987
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Literary fiction · Psychological fiction · War fiction
- Editions
- 14
- Languages
- 3 (German, English, Unspecified)
The catalog does not yet include a matching edition. Details may differ between editions.