A Stitch in Time

Written by Penelope Lively

Narrated by Lucy Scott

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination…

A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award,republished in the Collins Modern Classics range.

Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to hear things that aren’t there – a swing creaking, a dog barking – and when she sees a Victorian embroidered picture, Maria feels a strange connection with the ten-year-old, Harriet, who stitched it.

But what happened to her? As Maria becomes more lost in Harriet’s world, she grows convinced that something tragic occurred…

Perfect for fans of ghostly mysteries like ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780008484330

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is a novelist, short story writer and author of children's books. Her novels have won several literary awards including the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987, the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973, and the Whitbread Award for A Stitch in Time in 1976.

Reviews for A Stitch in Time

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm trying to read books with lighter themes during the current emergency. This is a classic children's mystery story written and set in the 1970s. Maria Foster is an 11 year old girl on holiday with her parents in Lyme Regis, staying in old Victorian house, where she hears a swing creaking and a dog barking that no one else can hear. She gets to hear more about Harriet, a girl of her own age, who lived in the house in the nineteenth century, and gets increasingly confused between the events of the two ages, though it isn't entirely clear whether this is a timeslip or a vivid imagination. The story is well written and describes the environment of Lyme Regis, a town I love, very well, particularly the fossils in the rocks, which prompt Maria to see the past as being preserved in the present and, in a sense, still continuing alongside contemporary events. Some of the experiences and feelings of a family holiday in the 1970s at the seaside rang true to me as a child of that decade (though we went elsewhere and my visits to Lyme Regis have all been in my middle age)!

[bookwren · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lovely, quiet novel perhaps more suitable for adults than children, though introspective, shy children would find a kindred spirit in Maria. The setting comes alive in Ms. Lively's vivid descriptions. I would love to visit the seaside town of Lyme Regis and see the many fossils.

[ed9pendragon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Though I haven’t yet read it Penelope Lively’s 2013 memoir, >Ammonites and Leaping Fish: a Life in Time, picks up some up the themes that permeate her 1976 Whitbread Children’s Book Award winner: growing old, books, her cat, ammonites of course, all what has been described as “her identifying cargo of possessions”. Ostensibly a ghost story this is more about what it’s like to be a solitary bookish child on the cusp of maturity, all told with sensitivity and poetry, so much so that it’s hard not to read aspects of her own childhood into this book. Her parents took what has been called “a rather inactive role” in the author’s life during her upbringing in pre-war Egypt; she describes it as “a childhood with enormous opportunities for solitude and imagination,” during which she spent “long hours just playing alone, building elaborate stories in my mind around my toy animals.”In A Stitch in Time Maria Foster is an only child taken in the summer of 1975 for a four week holiday to Lyme Regis; Mr and Mrs Foster have rented from a local resident, Mrs Shand, an old Victorian house which they discover is filled with furniture and artefacts accumulated over a hundred years. Maria is prone, much as the young Penelope Low did in Egypt, to having conversations with objects and animals in lieu of friends and siblings, which her rather distant parents construe as mumblings. But Maria is also an unusual auditory sensitive who hears sounds no one else hears; these noises include the squeak of a swing in the garden, the playing of the piano and the barking of a dog. She finds she develops an interest in fossils, a fascination she shares with Martin Lucas, whose noisy extended family are staying in the hotel next door; together they search Lyme’s beach for ammonites, the sea urchin Stomechinus bigranularis and Mesozoic oyster Gryphaea. But all the while Maria is becoming obsessed with one time inhabitants of their holiday home, Victorian sisters Susan and Harriet. In particular, what happened to Harriet? Is the answer in the landscape around Lyme — the fossils, the geology, the underlying morphology of the cliffs? And why can only she hear echoes of the past in her ammonite-shaped cochleae?A Stitch in Time is a beautifully written novel. Every few pages includes poetic passages evoking a feeling, a scene, a landscape: for example, a lovely day was better than one with a boring blue sky “because the sky was pleasantly busy with clouds, huge shining heaps of cloud that roamed across the horizon, ebbed and flowed, formed and reformed as you watched them… Everything would go grey and muted, as the sun went in, and there would be this band of golden colour sweeping along the cliffs to Weymouth, lighting up now a bright slice of rock, now a green field, now the white sparkle of a house, now the turquoise of the sea itself.”But it’s not just descriptions that ensured the accolade of a Whitbread Award; Maria herself is a believable character, a sensitive child who tries to piece together scraps of disparate evidence without asking questions that might make her seem stupid, the way that real children do. She’s also a very likeable individual, kind and thoughtful even if a bit of an enigma to the adults around her.How does Lively weave a story around Maria? Like any good author she includes a number of vibrantly coloured strands. Principally there is the recurrent image of the ammonite, a fossil plentiful in the rocks around Lyme; here is a natural spiral which could have suggested a tale of parallel lives separated by a hundred and ten years — though of course the match can never be exact. There are also the parallel lives of author and fictional character, though unlike Maria in the story the young Penelope was not to make real friends at boarding school in England, having to wait until she went to Oxford.And, speaking of strands, the ‘stitch in time’ of the title refers to a sampler that Maria comes across, a sampler that Maria’s Victorian counterpart Harriet had worked on and that her sister Susan completed. Other elements show up, scraps of odd material that somehow get drawn into the story. The dog that barks in Maria’s hearing which no one else is aware of? Perhaps Lively picked up on the legend of the Black Dog of Lyme: and though her black dog only shares a colour, not a backstory, with the local tale, it does function as an omen — just what it presages is not clear till the very end. And being set in Lyme Regis, one cannot not think of The French Lieutenant’s Women (1969) with its three optional endings; perhaps Lively is subtly referencing Fowles’ earlier novel by suggesting one ending while delivering a different conclusion.This is the first novel by the author that I’ve read since the seventies, from her other children’s books The Whispering Knights (1971) and The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971) to her Treasures of Time (1979) written for an adult audience, and it’s made me keen to read more of her work. I also wanted to compare it with two other similarly-titled time-related novels, the semi-autobiographical A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley and the science fantasy A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The fact is, while it includes some autobiography, some science and of course some fantasy, it mixes these elements in very different and individual ways. And it was such a delight to read — certainly one to read again.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wish I had read A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively when I was about twelve, as I know I would have fallen in love with this story. Unfortunately, the book, published in 1976, wasn’t yet around when I was the right age to read it. Nevertheless, this was still a very enjoyable story.The main character, Maria, was an endearing character, a serious child who had deep thoughts, and a huge imagination, she has trouble taking to humans but carries on long and intricate conversations with inanimate objects and animals, in this case a rather snotty cat. She does manage to befriend the boy next door to her holiday house, and she and Martin spend time together digging and looking up information on the fossils that are to be found in the Lyme Regis area. Learning a little of the people that used to live in the rented holiday house, Maria comes to believe she is being haunted by a little girl and her dog that lived there previously.The story is handled deftly by the author. The plot never goes over the top in it’s believability. She leaves a great deal up to the reader to decide which I rather liked. Was this a haunting, perhaps a slight wrinkle in time, or was this simply a little girl with a vivid imagination, whatever it was, the reader is treated to a timeless story that captures the essence of childhood.