The Gate of Angels. This item is unavailable.The Gate of Angels

Short-listed for the Booker Prize.

"A singular accomplishment." -- Boston Globe

"Powerfully bewitching." -- Los Angeles Times

In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger -- fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications -- not only of the heart but also of the head -- as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside down.

This new edition features an introduction by Philip Hensher, author of Scenes from Early Life, along with new cover art.

PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn't. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times Obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"