Penelope Fitzgerald

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' …

The Blue Flower is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a fictional treatment of part of the life of Friedrich van Hardenberg, who would become an early practitioner of German Romanticism, using the pseudonym Novalis. The Blue Flower was Fitzgerald's breakthrough work for American readers. It was the …

Offshore is a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. It won the Booker Prize for that year. It recalls her time spent on boats in Battersea by the Thames. The novel explores the concept of liminality and 'liminal people'; those who do not belong to the land or the sea, but somewhere in-between. The epigraph, "che mena il …

The Gate of Angels is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a historical novel set in 1912 at a fictional Cambridge college, St. Angelicus. It was short-listed for the Man Booker prize. Fitzgerald claims it is her only novel with a happy ending.

The Beginning of Spring is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Moscow in 1913, it tells the story of a Moscow-born son of a British emigre manufacturer whose Britain-born wife has suddenly abandoned him and their three children.

Human Voices is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is set in WW2 London during 1940, from the Fall of France to the Battle of Britain, providing a bureaucracy-heavy BBC-centric view of the war.

Beautiful Chiara is the last of the Ridolfi, a Florentine family of long lineage and eccentric habits. She is smitten with Salvatore, a brilliant but penniless doctor, a rational man who wants nothing to do with romance. This is the story of how these two--with the best intentions, the kindest of instincts, and the …

At Freddie's is a novel by British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It concerns the run-down, barely viable Temple Stage School, an acting school for children, known as "Freddie's", after its headmistress Frieda "Freddie" Wentworth. The children regularly perform as fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Arthur in King …

The last book and only collection of short stories by Penelope Fitzgerald fittingly showcases her at her wisest, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these stories are "mordantly funny, morally astute . . . [as] they plumb the endless absurdities of the human heart" (Washington Post Book World). Roaming the globe …