The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, is truly a delightful book. It tells the story of Florence Green, a World War Two widow, who opens a bookstore in a long-abandoned centuries-old house in a small town in Suffolk. It’s a tale of Florence’s courage to go ahead with the bookshop despite the opposition of the most powerful woman in town who had designs to make the ancient house a community arts center.

Fitzgerald believed that the world we live in is divided in her own words of “exterminators and exterminatees.” And the spunky Florence falls into the latter category, as the powerful Mrs. Gamart triumphs in the end. Yet her grace and tenacity in fighting the good fight to the end are inspiring.

Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career rather late in life at age 58. Her first novel was published at age 60. She soon received literary recognition as her third novel, The Bookshop, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978. The following year, her novel Offshore, won the Booker Prize. Both these novels reflected true life experiences of the author, who had worked in a Suffolk bookshop and lived on a barge on the Thames.