The Bookshop : A Novel
by Fitzgerald, Penelope
- Used
- Paperback
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
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Abingdon, Illinois, United States
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About This Item
Synopsis
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.
Reviews
A recent review of a new book about Penelope Fitzgerald in "The New Yorker" prompted me to search the shelves of my own used bookshop for a copy of one of her novels. Fortuitously, "The Bookshop" was the one Fitzgerald novel in stock.
The author herself sums up her works by saying that they are "...too sad really to be comedies, but not important enough to be tragedies." And this novel is no exception. Florence Green, widowed and childless, decides that her little Suffolk town needs a bookshop. Florence is one of the most endearing characters I have encountered in my recent reading, sweet and trusting, yet forceful when she needs to be. She encounters a formidable enemy in Mrs. Violet Gamart but also a powerful supporter in the reclusive but influential Mr. Brundish. The author's description of the landscape of the Suffolk coast in which her town of Hardcastle is located had me scrambling to my computer to Google up some images. While the scenes were lovely, Fitzgerald's description of the disappearing coastline and the creeping damp, combined with the portraits of the pettiness of the townspeople, does not have me scrambling for a ticket to Suffolk. Although both the characters and the landscape seem to be colluding to defeat her, Florence's unflagging sweet nature and her pluck and determination win the admiration of this reader. And the novel's terse, perceptive prose has won a new fan for Penelope Fitzgerald.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Get Your Books Here (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 3293
- Title
- The Bookshop : A Novel
- Author
- Fitzgerald, Penelope
- Book Condition
- Used
- Binding
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Boston, MA, U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company Trade & Reference Division, 1997
- Keywords
- ENGLAND FICTION HISTORICAL BOOKSELLERS BOOKSELLING WIDOWS 0395869463 NOVELS:
- Bookseller catalogs
- Novels: Fiction;
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Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Trade Paperback
- Used to indicate any paperback book that is larger than a mass-market paperback and is often more similar in size to a hardcover...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...