Penelope Fitzgerald

The Bookshop

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is "a marvelously piercing fiction" (Times Literary Supplement ), short-listed for the Booker Prize. With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day. 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. Basis for the major motion picture starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Revised edition
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Juni 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 203mm x 134mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 158g
• ISBN-13: 9780544484092
• ISBN-10: 0544484096
• Artikelnr.: 41245933

Autorenporträt

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?"

Rezensionen

'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

'Its stylishness, and this low-voiced lack of emphasis are a pleasure throughout, its moral and human positions invariably sympathetic. But it is astringent too: no self-pity in its self-effacing heroine, who in a world of let-downs and put-downs and poltergeists, keeps her spirit bright and her book-stock miraculously dry in the damp, seeping East Anglian landscape.' Isabel Quigley, Financial Times

'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, TLS