How it All Began by Penelope Lively begins violently with the mugging of retired and widowed schoolteacher Charlotte Rainford on a London street and then follows the lives of the people impacted by this random event: those both close to Charlotte like her adult daughter Rose and people she has never met like Marion, an interior designer and Jeremy, an antiques dealer.

Forced to recuperate at her daughter’s house, Charlotte introduces Anton, an Eastern European migrant into Rose’s life when she agrees to tutor him at her temporary home. Caught in a loveless marriage to dull Gerry, Rose develops strong feelings for Anton, who is funny, charming and sincere.

Meanwhile, in another part of London, the lives of retired diplomat and historian Lord Peters and his niece, Marion, are set on different courses by the mugging of Charlotte.

Rose works as the personal secretary to Lord Henry Peters. When she is unable to accompany him to give a lecture in Manchester because she has to take her mother to a doctor’s appoint, he asks his niece Marion to accompany him instead.

Without Rose by his side, Lord Peters forgets his lecture notes, and he gives an embarrassing performance that has him questioning his own relevance and embarking on a bizarre television project. Marion finds herself seated next to a charming, wealthy businessman, who at first seems to be the saviour of her struggling interior design business, but who turns out to be a conman.

Charlotte’s mugging also exposes an affair Marion is having with Jeremy, a self-centred married man who runs his own failing antiques business. Marion sends Jeremy at text message to say she cannot make a rendezvous, but it ends up being read by Jeremy’s wife, Stella. Stella engages a lawyer and files for divorce.

While this may sound like the makings of a rather gimmicky work of fiction, Lively, who is now well into her nineties and is a Booker Prize winner (1987 for Moon Tiger), does a great job of elegantly orchestrating events and drawing the reader into the heads of the characters as they navigate the unexpected challenges they must now navigate. The novel moves almost cinematically from one storyline to the next added by Lively’s beautiful prose and well-rounded characters.

Reading the book made me think of my own life and how random events that seemed inconsequential at the time, have had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life. An unexpected conversation, a chance encounter, a phone call missed or answered, an opportunity taken or not taken. All these things have set our lives on unplanned pathways. But more so, they have impacted the lives of others, people we know and those we will never know.

While I have not read any of her other books, I have read that the role of chance and “haphazard what-might-have-beens” (to quote a New York Times review) is a theme explored in other novels by Penelope Lively.

“Thus have various lives collided,” Lively writes in How it all Began, “the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next service station. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway — job done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.”

The butterfly effect, the notion that seemingly trivial events can set off chain reactions and generate unexpected consequences is a powerful concept and explored to great effect in How it All Began.

(It would also make a rather excellent television series, if well adapted.)