"Nobody will ever have seen one!" laughs Penelope Lively CBE of the typewriter she bought in Rymans for £99 at least 10 years ago – "and still working absolutely fine". In fact she writes in longhand, typing up her work at the end of each day, making small revisions as she goes. But the typewriter isn't the whole story; she also has an iPad, appreciates the way Google has transformed research and even has email, although her family often rings her to let her know they've sent a message. As you'd expect, her north London house is filled with books – in this room, a study that looks on to a garden square, there is history, archaeology, popular science and books about Egypt, where she was born and grew up and which she described in her acclaimed memoir Oleander, Jacaranda. Poetry, biography and more history are in other rooms, while "fiction is in the kitchen". The postcards propped up in front of the books are entrants and winners in Lively's annual postcard competition, awarded to the most interesting and eccentric card she receives (last year's winner showed Giacomo Puccini in a chauffeur-driven sidecar).

The house is also firmly connected to the past. The screen in front of the fireplace was embroidered by her grandmother and depicts Golsoncott, the family's Somerset home; the little figures at the bottom are not junior family members but evacuees who she looked after when it became a war nursery. Golsoncott was sold when Lively's aunt, artist Rachel Reckitt, died, although the family kept a cottage built in 1929. The pictures reflected in the mirror are Reckitt's and the house is, Lively says, "rather a shrine to her: her work is all over it". But there's plenty of evidence of younger generations, too: the personalised calendar hanging from the window shutter shows Rachel, the eldest of Lively's six grandchildren, graduating from Oxford.

How It All Began is published by Fig Tree on 3 November at £16.99