Settled into the drowsy village life of Laddenham, where she is playing camp follower to her highly successful husband - clever, agnostic and interested - Clare Paling discovers that small communities offer interesting sideshows of adultery, gossip and carefully adhered to pecking orders.

Judgement Day is the third novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively.

Settled into the drowsy village life of Laddenham, where she is playing camp follower to her highly successful husband - clever, agnostic and interested - Clare Paling discovers that small communities offer interesting sideshows of adultery, gossip and carefully adhered to pecking orders.

It takes the pageant celebrating the church's fourth centenary and an unpardonable death to remind Clare, who had almost forgotten, that the world is a very uncertain place.

'Beautiful and brillliant' Auberon Waugh

'I find Penelope Lively almost excessively gifted . . . the most enjoyable novel I have read for a very long time indeed' The Times

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.