Author(s): Penelope Fitzgerald

Fiction

Short-listed for the Booker Prize A beautiful book, a perfect little gem. BBC "Kaleidoscope" A marvelously piercing fiction. "Times Literary Supplement" 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. This new edition features an introduction by David Nicholls, author of "One Day," along with new cover art."