Book description
New to ebook: from the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and
'The Blue Flower' 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. '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 Penelope Fitzgerald was the
author of nine novels, three of which - The Bookshop, The Beginning of
Spring and The Gate of Angels - were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. A superb biographer and critic,
she was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, the
poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers, a study of her remarkable
family. She died in April 2000.
