How It All Began

How It All Began by Penelope Lively is a novel of chance meetings and experiences that create more chance meetings and experiences that alter the courses of many lives like a domino effect.

This is all based on chaos theory, or more specifically, the butterfly effect. The idea that the flapping of a single butterfly's wing in the Amazon produces a tiny change in the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done, causing a tornado on the other side of the world.

Lively's novel takes one incident, the mugging of Charlotte Rainsford, and follows the chain of events this accident causes, tracing the effect on the lives of several people that Charlotte knows nothing of. It is an interesting premise and for the most part an interesting book. 

Nothing too extraordinary here, but still an enjoyable read. This is the first of Lively's books that I've read and I would like to read others, as she is quite prolific.