Penelope Fitzgerald
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted story of books and busybodies in East Anglia.
This, Penelope Fitzgerald’s second novel, was her first to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is set in a small East Anglian coastal town, where Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. ‘She had a kind heart, but that is not much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.’
Hardborough becomes a battleground, as small towns so easily do. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. This is a story for anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.
Reviews of The Bookshop
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- ‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks
- ‘Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer.’ David Nicholls
- ‘[Penelope Fitzgerald’s] work is subtle, funny, wrong-footing, and cumulatively powerful.’ Julian Barnes
- ‘Penelope Fitzgerald’s resources of odd people are impressively rich. Raven, the marshman, who ropes Florence in to hang on to an old horse’s tongue while he files the teeth; old Brundish, secretive as a badger, slow as a gorse bush. And this is not just a gallery of quirky still lives; these people appear in vignettes, wryly, even comically animated…On any reckoning, a marvellously piercing fiction.’ Valentine Cunningham, Times Literary Supplement
More from Penelope Fitzgerald
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Matchbook Classics Box Set
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The Blue Flower (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)
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The Bookshop
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The Blue Flower
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Offshore
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The Bookshop
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The Means of Escape
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So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
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The Golden Child
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Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends
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Edward Burne-Jones
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Edward Burne-Jones
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Human Voices
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The Gate of Angels
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The Beginning of Spring
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The Bookshop
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The Golden Child
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Innocence
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At Freddie’s
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Innocence
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The Knox Brothers
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The Blue Flower
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The Means of Escape
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At Freddie’s
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Offshore
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A House of Air
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So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
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The Beginning of Spring
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So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
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Human Voices
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The Gate of Angels
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The Gate of Angels
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Offshore
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Offshore
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The Golden Child
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Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends
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