The Bookshop - Softcover

Fitzgerald, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0544484096 ISBN 13: 9780544484092

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2015

Synopsis

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING EMILY MORTIMER, BILL NIGHY, AND PATRICIA CLARKSON

Short-listed for the Booker Prize
"A beautiful book, a perfect little gem." -- BBC Kaleidoscope
"A marvelously piercing fiction." -- Times Literary Supplement

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop -- the only bookshop -- in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

This new edition features an introduction by David Nicholls, author of One Day.

About this title

Review

Penelope Fitzgerald's books are small, perfect devastations of human hope and inhuman (ie, all-too-human) behaviour. The Bookshop unfolds in a tiny Sussex seaside town, which by 1959 is virtually cut off from the outside English world. Post-war peace and plenty having passed it by, Hardborough is defined chiefly by what it doesn't have. It does have, however, plenty of observant inhabitants, most of whom are keen to see Florence Green's new bookshop fail.

But rising damp will not stop Florence, nor will the resident, malevolent poltergeist (or "rapper", in the local patois). Nor will she be thwarted by Violet Gamart, who has designs on Florence's building for her own arts series and will go to any lengths to get it. One of Florence's few allies (who is, unfortunately, a hermit) warns her: "She wants an Arts Centre. How can the arts have a centre? But she thinks they have, and she wishes to dislodge you."

Once the Old House Bookshop is up and running, Florence is subjected to the hilarious perils of running a subscription library, training a 10-year-old assistant and obtaining the right merchandise for her customers. Men favour works "by former SAS men, who had been parachuted into Europe and greatly influenced the course of the war; they also placed orders for books by Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men, and questioned their credentials." Women fight over a biography of Queen Mary. "This was in spite of the fact that most of them seemed to possess inner knowledge of the court--more, indeed, than the biographer." But it is only when the slippery Milo North suggests Florence sell the Olympia Press edition of "Lolita" that Florence comes under legal and political fire.

Fitzgerald's heroine divides people into "exterminators and exterminatees", a vision she clearly shares with her creator--but the author balances disillusion with grace, wit and weirdness, favouring the open ending over the moral absolute. Penelope Fitzgerald's internecine if gentle world-view even extends to literature--books are living, jostling things. Florence finds that paperbacks, crowding "the shelves in well-disciplined ranks", vie with Everyman editions, which "in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach."

Review

"Belongs in the first flight of English novelists writing today." -- Boston Globe

"A marvelously piercing fiction." -- Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0544484096
• ISBN 13: 9780544484092
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192