 First edition | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Gerald Duckworth [1] |
Publication date | 1978 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 118 [1] |
| ISBN | 0-395-86946-3 |
| OCLC | 37155604 |
| 823/.914 21 | |
| LC Class | PR6056.I86 B66 1997 |
The Bookshop is a 1978 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel was made into a film by Isabel Coixet in 2017.
The novel, set mainly in 1959, follows Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk (a thinly-disguised version of Southwold). [2] The location she chooses is the Old House, an abandoned, damp property said to be haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). After many sacrifices, Florence manages to start her business, which grows for about a year, after which sales slump. She is opposed by the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart, who wants to acquire the Old House to set up an arts centre. Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of parliament, sponsors a bill that empowers local councils to buy any historic building that has been left uninhabited for five years. The bill is passed, the Old House is compulsorily purchased, and Florence is evicted.
As a novel by a still relatively unknown writer, The Bookshop appeared to mostly condescending initial reviews. [3] The Times called it "a harmless, conventional little anecdote, well-tailored but uninvolving"; The Guardian a "disquieting" novel about "really nasty people living in a really nice little coastal town"; and The Times Literary Supplement , while calling it "marvellously piercing", pigeonholed it as an example of "the Beryl Bainbridge school of anguished women's fiction". [3] Auberon Waugh in the Evening Standard publicly advised her to write longer books. [3] But a few critics did understand her immediately: Richard Mayne on BBC Radio 3's Critics Forum praised the "wonderful precision, economy and certainty" of the writer". [3]
The book was shortlisted for the 1978 Booker Prize: [4] a surprise given the tone of some of the initial reviews. [3]
"The Bookshop catches Fitzgerald coming into top form" said Peter Wolfe in Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004). [5] Wolfe held the book to be a fully realized work of fiction that confirms the author's hold on actuality and the cogency of her satire. [6] In an introduction to a 2010 reprint, Frank Kermode wrote that the novel had won Fitzgerald "the respectful attention of reviewers and the admiration of a larger public". [7] Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald's biographer, considered the novel to be "a joyous exercise in precise, eloquent detail"; [8] a novel that "uses its small-scale comic plot for a serious moral argument". [9]
Writing for The Guardian in 2023, Anthony Cummins noted that the book's early patronising reviews "missed Fitzgerald’s precise gift for dramatising complex moral questions in the most quaintly innocuous of settings." He considered the book to mark the first full expression of the author's perfectly poised satirical voice; a memorable tragicomedy of stifling small-town English cruelties. [10]
In 2017 the novel was adapted by Isabel Coixet into a film of the same name, with Emily Mortimer as Florence Green, Patricia Clarkson as Violet Gamart, and Bill Nighy as Edmund Brundish.
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books.
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Isabel Coixet Castillo is a Spanish film director. She is one of the most prolific film directors of contemporary Spain, having directed twelve feature-length films since the beginning of her film career in 1988, in addition to documentary films, shorts, and commercials. Her films depart from the traditional national cinema of Spain, and help to “untangle films from their national context ... clearing the path for thinking about national film from different perspectives.” The recurring themes of “emotions, feelings, and existential conflict” coupled with her distinct visual style secure the “multifaceted ” filmmaker's status as a “Catalan auteur.”
The Blue Flower is the final novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1995. It is a fictional treatment of the early life and troubled relationships of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, became a foundational figure of German Romanticism.
Offshore is a 1979 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Her third novel, it won the Booker Prize in the same year. The book explores the emotional restlessness of houseboat dwellers who live neither fully on the water nor fully on the land. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach.
Gwendoline Riley is an English writer.
The Great Fire (2003) is a novel by the Australian author Shirley Hazzard. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and a Miles Franklin literary award (2004). The novel was Hazzard's first since The Transit of Venus, published in 1980.
The Golden Child is a 1977 mystery novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, her first published work of fiction. Written while her husband was terminally ill, and partly for his benefit, the novel offers a satirical version of the 1972 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, and pokes fun at museum politics, academic scholars, and Cold War spying.
Human Voices is a 1980 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It relates the fictionalised experiences of a group of BBC employees at Broadcasting House, London, in 1940 when the city was under nightly attack from the Luftwaffe's high explosive, incendiary, and parachute bombs.
The Gate of Angels is a 1990 historical novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is set in 1912 at St Angelicus, a fictional Cambridge University college. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
At Freddie's is a 1982 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. The last of her novels drawing directly on her personal experiences, it focuses on an august but shabby London stage school for children, TheTemple. Fitzgerald had herself been a general studies teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. The school in the novel is known as Freddie's after its elderly principal Freddie Wentworth, a character partly based on that of the impresario Lilian Baylis. The book received mixed reviews on its first UK publication, and on its 1985 appearance in the US.
Innocence is a 1986 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Italy, it is a comedy of manners concerning the marriage of the young daughter of an old but impoverished aristocratic family, and a young neurologist who has tried to cut himself off from emotion. "Innocence" is the first of a group of four historical novels written by Fitzgerald at the end of her career. It was her first book to be published in the USA.
The Beginning of Spring is a 1988 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Moscow in 1913, it tells the story of a Moscow-born English-educated print shop owner whose English wife has suddenly abandoned him and their three children. The novel was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize.
The Bookshop is a 2017 drama film written and directed by Isabel Coixet, based on the 1978 novel of the same name by Penelope Fitzgerald, in which the lead character attempts against opposition to open a bookshop in the coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk. Shooting took place in Portaferry and Strangford, County Down, Northern Ireland and in Barcelona during August and September 2016.
The Means of Escape is a 2000 short story collection by Penelope Fitzgerald, published shortly after her death. It was first issued as a series of eight stories, most of which were first published between 1975 and 1998.
Guy Gunaratne is a British journalist, filmmaker and novelist. Gunaratne identifies as non-binary and uses he/they/them pronouns.
Small Things like These is a historical fiction novel by Claire Keegan, published on 30 November 2021 by Grove Press. In 2022, the book won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Booker Prize.
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