 First edition | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Gerald Duckworth[1] |
Publication date | 1978 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| 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 authorPenelope Fitzgerald. It was shortlisted for theBooker Prize. The novel wasmade into a film byIsabel 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 ofSouthwold).[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 anarts centre. Mrs Gamart's nephew, amember of parliament, sponsors abill that empowerslocal councils to buy any historic building that has been left uninhabited for five years. The bill is passed, the Old House iscompulsorily 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"; andThe Times Literary Supplement, while calling it "marvellously piercing", pigeonholed it as an example of "theBeryl Bainbridge school of anguished women's fiction".[3]Auberon Waugh in theEvening Standard publicly advised her to write longer books.[3] But a few critics did understand her immediately:Richard Mayne onBBC Radio 3's Critics Forum praised the "wonderful precision, economy and certainty" of the writer".[3]
The book was shortlisted for the 1978Booker 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 inUnderstanding 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 forThe 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 byIsabel Coixet into a filmof the same name, withEmily Mortimer as Florence Green,Patricia Clarkson as Violet Gamart, andBill Nighy as Edmund Brundish.