The Bookshop

By Penelope Fitzgerald

National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is "a marvelously piercing fiction" (Times Literary Supplement), short-listed for the Booker Prize.

With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day.

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.

Basis for the major motion picture starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547524771

Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

Book preview

Copyright © 1978 by Penelope Fitzgerald

Introduction copyright © 2014 by David Nicholls

Preface copyright © 2013 by Hermione Lee

Second Mariner Books edition 2015

First published in Great Britain by Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd. in 1978

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-48409-2 (pbk.)

Cover illustration © Julie Morstad

eISBN 978-0-547-52477-1

v4.0220

Penelope Fitzgerald

Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life—working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school—or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity—she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction

For several years in the mid-1990s I worked in a West London bookshop, running the children’s department with a rod of iron and supervising, with noisy resentment, the section called ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’. My colleagues for the most part were English Literature graduates or postgraduates, knowledgeable and passionate about the written word. Yes, we were shop assistants but the fact that we sold books, as opposed to socks or potatoes or saucepans, gave the job a certain respectability, kudos almost. Even if our bestsellers were sporting biographies or SAS memoirs or greetings cards, bookselling was practically a branch of academia. Books mattered, they were different, they were ‘improving’.

Florence Green, the heroine of Fitzgerald’s second novel, proprietor of an East Suffolk small town bookshop, feels much the same. In a terse letter to her solicitor, she quotes the endpaper of her Everyman editions:

‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life,’ and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Surely Penelope Fitzgerald felt something like this, though she would have expressed it in plainer language. Don’t all novelists believe that books matter, that they’re different and necessary? When stocking her bookshop, Florence places those Everyman editions, in their ‘shabby dignity’, between Religion and Home Medicine, and isn’t this where literature belongs, somewhere between the spiritual and the earthly, the practical?

And yet what’s striking, in a novel called The Bookshop, is the absence of books, or specifically fiction and literature. The readers in the town of Hardborough have no interest in Ruskin or Keats or Austen, T. S. Eliot or Henry James. They crave books about royalty and the SAS, spotters’ guides, the score for the Messiah and greetings cards (an indication, I suppose, of how little the book trade changes) and Fitzgerald has great fun with the staggeringly banal titles: Build Your Own Racing Dinghy, I Flew With the Führer, Daily Life in Ancient Britain. Categorisation is not by subject, but by popularity: A, B and ‘the repellent Cs’, books that have acquired ‘a peculiar fragrance’, with titles like The History of Chinese Thought. A good book may well be the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, but for the bank manager they serve another purpose:

‘Don’t misunderstand me . . . I find a good book at my bedside of incalculable value. When I eventually retire I’ve no sooner read a few pages than I’m overwhelmed with sleep.’

And what about literature, and specifically fiction? The only novel mentioned at length, Lolita, saves Florence’s business, but there is no discussion of its contents, its characters or themes or story. Mr Brundish’s appraisal is characteristically to the point:

‘It is a good book, and therefore you should try and sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.’

That last sentence is a typical Fitzgerald notion, overturning the conventional, sentimental idea. Art, culture, literature seem to improve no one in Hardborough. The most ‘cultured’, ‘artistic’ people in this community are also the most monstrous. For the malign Mrs Gamart, an interest in ‘Culture’ brings social status and the illusion of sophistication. She will happily abandon compassion and decency to establish her precious arts centre, vital if the town is to compete socially with high-and-mighty Aldeburgh. Charming Milo works for the revered BBC, that bastion of liberal-humanistic values, yet he is lazy, vain and casually cruel. ‘His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether’, and what at first seems like gentleness is a cover for his appalling selfishness. Another typically incisive Fitzgerald observation:

Gentleness is not kindness. His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.

Even the hopeless watercolourist Theodore Gill (‘who saw no reason to abandon the pleasant style of the turn of the century’) is conceited, selfish and insensitive. Florence aside, the decent, loyal characters—Christine, Wally, Raven—are the least pretentious, indifferent to culture and the social status it brings. Christine prefers ‘stickers’ and bookmarks over books, and only reads Bunty:

Her resentment was directed against everyone who had to do with books, and reading, and made it a condition of success to write little compositions . . . She hated them all.

With the exception of Mr Brundish, whom Florence only meets once, it is also worth noting that her main allies belong to the working class and, in the case of the Gippings, almost an underclass; there are glancing references to incest, to children running wild, eating maggots, pelting each other with stones or beets.

Hardborough is not quite the real world. Isolated and enclosed, its parochial philistinism is exaggerated for comic effect. Phyllis Neame, the owner of the Southwold bookshop where Penelope Fitzgerald once worked, contested the portrayal of the town, insisting that everyone had been much nicer in real life. But this fictional town is stripped of quaintness. It is a harsh, class-bound place. There’s a startling passage where Christine’s mother discusses education, finding a sudden eloquence on the practical repercussions of Christine’s failure to pass the dreaded Eleven Plus:

‘It’s what we call a death sentence. I’ve nothing against the Technical, but it just means this: what chance will she ever have of meeting and marrying a white-collar chap? She won’t ever be able to look above a labouring chap or even an unemployed chap and believe me, Mrs Green, she’ll be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies.’

Contrast this with Milo North, going ‘through life with singularly little effort’. Florence and the Gippings are decent but powerless and yet one small remark from the vicious Mrs Gamart can have repercussions in the Houses of Parliament and ultimately destroy a livelihood. Intelligence has nothing to do with it; Christine is eccentric but also bright, shrewd, passionate and insightful, while Mrs Gamart’s nephew, the pliable MP who facilitates Florence’s downfall, is ‘brilliant, successful and stupid’. Like Florence, Christine fails because she can’t tell ‘which number comes next’. In one of the book’s most striking images, the difference between a white envelope, denoting acceptance by the grammar school, and a buff envelope, denoting the Technical, is the difference between success and drudgery. ‘Hardborough children, looking back in future years over a long life, would remember nothing more painful or more decisive than the envelopes waiting on the desks.’

Yet while class is everywhere in The Bookshop, money and social status are not the only dividing lines. The novel is political in the sense that Fitzgerald’s sympathies and instincts, like Florence’s, are liberal and broadly antiauthoritarian, but the real division in life, the one that matters, is that between the ‘exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating’. This is a recurring theme in Fitzgerald’s books, particularly in those earlier novels drawn from episodes in her life, and it’s hard to think of a novelist who writes more compassionately and insightfully about failure. The Bookshop, which she called ‘her first straight novel’ after The Golden Child, gives the idea its clearest expression. Florence values kindness above everything. She is decent, principled, intelligent and

Reviews for The Bookshop

[autumnesf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A sad little book about an old woman wants to open a book shop.

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Set in England in 1959, Florence Green is a widow in her fifties who elects to open a bookshop in a quiet seaside village. She buys the Old House, which has been vacant for over five years and rumored to be haunted. The business begins to thrive, but it does not last long. It seems she has transgressed social boundaries in purchasing this house that a local woman wants to use as an arts center. This book is not a cozy read about a bookstore. It is a sad story of jealousy and scheming against a person who has done nothing wrong. It is a short book and a quick read. It was published in 1978 and nominated for the Booker Prize. The story is nicely written but I never fully engaged with it.

[therebelprince · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Culture is for amateurs."

It is now de rigueur to declare Fitzgerald as one of the great neglected English novelists of the 20th century, and I must add my voice to that woeful chorus. Her starkly funny - or perhaps humorous upsetting - style is akin to those great ladies Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym. Her characters, like theirs, often hover on the fringes of good society; the "distressed gentlewomen", Pym often calls them.

Florence Green is one such character, a plain but still reasonably young widow who chooses to open a bookshop in a town that wants to reject her at every turn - even her resident poltergeist wants nothing to do with her. In 10 short chapters, Fitzgerald outlines Florence's unsettling encounters with the townfolk in wry, pointed notes, never allowing us to become either sympathetic or deeply enmeshed in the lives of any of them. Its events are of no consequence, and yet somehow feel staggeringly consequential. And at the heart of it all are questions about how we appreciate culture, how we relate to books themselves, and why we allow our dreams to take hold of us against all reason.

A deeply enjoyable read for fans of ironic British novelists.

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An odd little story. In a way nothing happens and yet, a woman arrives in a small village, opens a bookshop, is bothered by a poltergeist, has some moderate success and then all of a sudden it all goes belly up.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Why would anyone open a bookshop in a DAMP basement?With this alternately pleasant, but ultimately boring and predictable, plot with few twists,readers may end up feeling dreary.

[quondame · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A simple seeming story of a widow who opens a book shop in a small semi-isolated town on the coast of Suffolk mid-20th century. She is opposed by the town's most active social force. It went by quickly, which is good for me because I wasn't getting anything but an uneasy mood from it.

[teresa1966-460496 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At times our personal experiences and our literary ones neatly over lap. It was Penelope Fitzgerald's short novel about an outsider attempting to open a bookshop in a town she's unfamiliar which did so for me.
Although in my case it was two outsiders, opening two book shops and in two unknown towns, the discomfort rang true. We should've displayed the works of Camus in the window, to see if the townsfolk got the message.

[sandyamcpherson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fitzgerald wrote an acerbic view of a small East Anglian village. Here, the townsfolk reflect a hierarchical society, cast in an economically-depressed situation. The story was a very bittersweet look at the efforts of a middle-aged widow attempting to make a go of running a bookshop under difficult circumstances.The characterisations are quick, brief pen strokes, populating the narrative with mostly not very nice people. The lack of empathy and the self-serving village ‘aristocracy’ were very trying to read about. The novel reminds one of Sheridan’s School for Scandal in the way village culture reflects the insidious influence in this society. The village Queen Bee (Mrs. Gamart) is a nasty piece of work and there are few redeeming personalities in the other characters. Perhaps that was the point? Fitzgerald drew an excellent portrait of this dark side to village life and for that alone, the book deserves the 3-stars.

[carriewuj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 This is a small book, but it takes a big effort to pick up on all the understated meaning and happenings. The narrator has a Dickens-like quality of knowing a lot and subtly commenting on what is happening, while pushing the plot along. The plot is rather simple: It is 1959 and Florence Green, a widow "in her middle years" has determined she would like to open a bookshop in her isolated seaside marshy town of Hardborough. She buys an old deserted house "Old House" complete with poltergeist, or "rapper" as the locals call it, and opens shop. However, in pursuing her plan, she crosses one of the society matrons, Mrs. Violet Gamart, who wants the same spot for an Arts Council, even though she has had numerous years to put this in motion. The town becomes a little divided on the issue, but again, all very understatedly so. In this way the reader gets to know more of the townspeople through their actions and characteristics: Christine Gipping, the 10 year old who becomes Florence's sales clerk with quite a bit of authority, Milo North, a Londoner, and rather unambitious young man of no convictions with ties to the BBC and a live-in girlfriend, Kattie, Mr. Brundish, the town patriarch from the oldest family, who is essentially a recluse, but Florence's staunchest supporter. The comic way they all interact and know exactly what is happening in each other's lives throughout the town would make for a great Masterpiece Theatre programme. In one "episode," Florence stocks her store with the new bestseller, Lolita, and I thought that would be her undoing, but it is humourously her smartest business move. In another episode, a watercolorist shows up with all his canvases to exhibit in her tiny shop because her lack of an answer to his query meant an invitation to him. The narrator's wry commentary is typical: "Later middle age for the upper-middle class in East Suffolk, marked a crisis, after which the majority became water-colourists, and painted landscapes. It would not have mattered so much if they had painted badly but they all did it quite well. All their pictures looked much the same." (58) "Courage and endurance are useless if never tested" (18) and that is the position Florence finds herself in throughout the short story, trying to justify her existence and business in the town. The ending is disappointing, but the journey to it is worthwhile.

[arewenotben · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Starts off well and captures smalltown East Anglian life well, but even for a short novel I found it a bit of a struggle to finish. Good cast of villains though.

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Bookshop" is a good book, but it's worth noting how similar it is to a lot of bad books. It takes place in a small, English picturesque town that seems charmingly stuck in time. It's a place where everyone knows one another, full of bright-eyed, industrious kids, taciturn fishermen, a slightly ridiculous local aristocracy, and more eccentrics than you'd think possible. Everyone knows everyone else's business. We hear a lot of local dialect. If it had been written slightly differently, "The Bookshop" could have been a cheesy romance or a cozy mystery. Thank heavens that Penelope Fitzgerald did us the favor of writing this one instead. The book's center is its main character: Florence Green, the owner of the titular shop. She's a woman starting over relatively late in life who knows her chances, is unshakably committed to her project, and seems to thrive on adversity itself. An outsider to most of the townspeople and a widow, she's tough-minded and a survivor, but also a loner. She reminded me not a little of Peggy Cort, the head librarian that served as the focal point of Elizabeth McCracken "The Giant's House." It seems slightly ridiculous to say that a book that describes her efforts to start up a bookshop in a rural English town is about her confrontation with evil, but I'm not sure that would be exactly inaccurate. Fitzgerald, unlike other writers who deal with this sort of material, has a remarkably sharp take on evil, and not just its most snarling, aggressive manifestations. Fitzgerald's novel is filled with characters that, although it would be difficult to call them bad in every sense, but might be called morally lax: too passive, too egocentric, and not careful enough with their own selves. In this novel's constrained setting, their sins accumulate and "The Bookshop" turns, slowly and inevitably, into a small tragedy. This might be considered, in its own way, a bit of a relief. Since Amazon started eating up establishments like Florence Green's by the gross, it's hard not to get a little nostalgic about small bookstores, but I suspect that Florence herself wouldn't be having any of it. She's nothing if not practical and unsentimental about the business of books; Fitzgerald, who'd done bookshop work herself, makes an effort to present bookselling a trade like any other. The reader learns which books sell and which books don't, how returns work, and, ultimately, how hard it is to keep a bookshop going. Indeed, the question of literary quality is raised only once, and Florence isn't the one who resolves the issue. Now that we can imagine a future in which booksellers are about as common as farriers, "The Bookshop" might serve as a useful historical document from a time when a small city without a bookstore was something of an anomaly. For a novel that can seem pastoral and quaint, "The Bookshop" has real teeth, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also moved some readers to think of some much-missed bookshop in their own pasts. I, however, have to admit that I read it on my Kindle.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, opens a bookshop in a seaside village. She encounters hardships at almost every turn. This is a brief but powerful novella. Although not the story I expected, the struggles depicted demonstrate a more realistic situation than many of the "bookshop" books on the market.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the late 1950s, middle-aged widow Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in a small seaside village in Norfolk. Mrs. Green had worked in a bookshop between the wars. That bookshop is closing, and Mrs. Green is able to acquire its remaining stock for her store. (That should have been her first clue that maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all. If the books hadn’t sold in the city, what makes her think they’d sell in a small village?) Mrs. Green unknowingly thwarts the plans of Violet Gamart to use the old house for an arts centre. Mrs. Gamart is second only to Edmund Brundish in the village’s social hierarchy, and she uses her influence to chip away at Mrs. Green’s enterprise.This is not a feel-good English village novel, and it left me feeling melancholy. It’s as if Benson’s Lucia is pitted against one of Pym’s excellent women, with Lucia retaining the upper hand throughout. I’m not sure what purpose the poltergeist is meant to serve. I think maybe it was trying to warn Mrs. Green, and even it gave up on her in the end.

[kayis813-163108 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was okay. Kind of boring and it didn't really seem to have a point but it was interesting enough I guess. It had some nice parts.

[mbmackay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A quirky little book about quirky people in a quirky little town in England. A delight to read and enjoy.

[amaraki-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As I had seen the movie the previous summer, this rather interfered with my reading as comparisons would be made. Surprisingly I liked the movie better, perhaps the only time this has happened. Not the least of which for the somewhat happy ending of the movie that is missing from the abrupt conclusion of the novella. Mostly the movie kept very close to the text of the story, but somehow added greater depth to the characters. On its own I found this novella well paced with lovely prose and lots of understated humour, but again sparse on the characterization -- which perhaps is to be expected in a short work. Nice but not great.

[samsattler · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was surprised to learn that Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, surprised primarily because the book is so short that it does not allow for its multiple characters to be much developed before the book reaches its quick ending. I should say, too, that I stumbled upon the well-received 2017 movie version of the book a few weeks ago and watched that film before reading the novella (it’s between 118 and 163 pages long depending on which edition is chosen). The movie was more depressing than it was sad, but even then I was intrigued enough by some of the characters that I decided to read the book in order to learn more about them and their motivations. But it turns out that, the screen play does a better job of exploring the characters than the book does – and that’s not at all what I expected to find.The Bookshop is the story of Florence Green, a middle-aged widow who in 1959 moves to the fictional English seaside village of Hardborough to open the only bookshop in town. It is only after she buys the Old House and opens the shop that Florence learns that one of the most influential women in Hardborough wants to close her down and use the Old House for her own purposes. It is no small accomplishment that the bookstore ever manages to open its doors in the first place, as the Old House is a damp old wreck when she moves in and is even haunted by the Rapper, a noisy ghost that refuses to vacate the property. Florence does manage to open the doors even though the only hired help she can afford is a ten-year-old girl who comes in on Saturdays and after school every day. Florence, though, gets lucky when the little girl turns out to have excellent organizational skills that can be put to good use in a bookstore – especially a shop whose owner knows so little about running such a place herself. And when Florence decides to feature Vladimir Nabokov’s brand new (to England) novel Lolita in the shop window and sales take off, it looks like she just may make a go of the shop after all. The ruthless Mrs. Gamart, however, never gives up her campaign to rid the Old House of its books and bookstore-owner so that she and those who think like her can convert it into an arts center. She is always there, more or less in the background, pushing others to do her will, and before long Florence is forced to take the threat seriously. Can she actually be evicted from the Old House despite the fact that it is both her only home and source of income? More importantly, will she?Bottom Line: The Bookshop has an interesting story to tell but the sparseness of so many of its characters makes it difficult to believe. That Mrs. Gamart is an amoral woman whose personality intimidates her ex-military officer husband is obvious. What is not so obvious is why a seaside tourist village is filled with so many people just like her. I suspect that if that backstory had been explored in The Bookshop, I would have enjoyed it much more than I did.

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a nice little story. Its amusing and very proper. However, the conclusion left me asking what the point?

[lisahistory · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charming and delightful if somewhat forgettable, a woman opens a bookshop in a town which doesn't really want one, except for an old aristocrat no one sees.

[steller0707 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant and very British! The odds are definitely stacked against Florence Green, starting with her banker, as she begins to make a go of a new bookshop in rural Suffolk by the North Sea. There are definitely hurtles to be overcome - such as deciding what books she should stock that would appeal to customers and where to store them to protect them from the dampness that permeates the town. Along the way she manages to befriend many of the town's vividly drawn characters and alienate others. A very funny and poignant book.

[2wondery_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I finally abandoned this as too depressing midway through.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

What on earth was the Booker committee thinking when they shortlisted this? More to the point, why do all these other 'community' reviewers think this is such a good book? These questions suggest that I am out of step with the rest of the world, which of course is true, but I think there is also some other factor at play. Many people describe this as humerous, but I'd be surprised if I smiled more than once in the hundred or so pages that I read before pulling the plug. Humour is, after all, a very personal thing. I wonder if the book is also somewhat dated now? I also felt as though none of the characters was treated with sufficient depth for my liking. I suspect I might have given it a higher rating if I had continued to the end, but I'm just too old to spend time on anything that isn't giving an adequate return for my investment (thanks for permission, Nancy Pearl).

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A friend put me on to Penelope Fitzgerald a year or two ago, and I read and enjoyed her first novel The Golden Child (1977). It is a satire of life in a cultural institution, this one a museum in the King Tut boom of the 70’s. There was also a funny bumbling Cold War espionage angle. I’ve been picking up her other titles as I see them at Friends of the Library sales, but hadn’t read another until The Bookshop last week. A war widow in late 1950s England resolves to open a book store in the seaside village where she has lived for ten years. Let me try to illustrate how good it is by describing all the ways that the recent movie adaptation was awful. I think the movie was actually longer than the book—you can read the book in about two hours, and it flies. The movie is nine hours long, seemingly, and I only watched about 45 minutes of it.Fitzgerald is entirely clear-eyed, sharp, warm, and very funny. The movie, on the other hand, is ponderous, mawkish, self-important, humorless, and dull. The movie protagonist rhapsodizes about the magical significance of books and stores full of them, which is absent from the novel. In the novel she’s trying to be a businesswoman, and is totally unsentimental about books (as people in the book business actually tend to be). She doesn’t even seem to be particularly well-read. I gather from the preview that the big middle part of the movie which I skipped turned her into a moralizing crusader against censorship in opposition to the rural fuddy-duddies scandalized by Lolita. Penelope Fitzgerald, though, doesn’t moralize.The movie also ruins an interesting relationship by hinting at a totally implausible romance which is absent from the book. And the entire narration (by a grown version of a child character in the book) is a creation of the movie, is execrable, and would make Penelope Fitzgerald vomit in horror if she were alive to hear it. I skipped to the last few minutes of the movie to satisfy my morbid curiosity about what they would do to the ending and thereby stoke my burning hatred for everyone involved (except of course Bill Nighy, who has license from me to do whatever he wants at any time). I will give what little credit is due: They ruined the ending in a totally inexplicable, incomprehensible, and out-of-nowhere way, instead of ruining it in the way you expected. Avoid the movie with extreme prejudice.The book, on the other hand, is recommended.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My expectations were a bit Pym-ish. The Bookshop promised all sorts of apt visions, austerity, widows, spinsters, modernity, the Church. Well there were traces of such harbored within, but the bend bent elsewhere. I was actually reminded of Murdoch's Sandcastles, the provincials backbiting like crabs, human spirit crushed by petty jealousy. It was perfect day for this here: cats and dogs all day.

[brokenangelkisses · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would love to run a bookshop.By which I mean I would love to live in one, arranging the books just so, dipping in and out of my favourite tomes, discovering new authors and titles as part of my job - what bliss it all seems!But of course, the reality would be rather more challenging: balancing the books, drawing in the customers who who would rather buy online, managing staff and limited resources.At least I would hope to have the support and backing of my local community (although here I think sadly of Kathleen Kelly’s lovely Shop around the Corner in ‘You’ve Got Mail’), but in Penelope Fitzgerald’s quietly fatalistic novel, ‘The Book Shop’, community support is the vital ingredient new bookshop proprietor, Florence Green, lacks.=== The blurb: ===England. 1959. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and in doing so has crossed those who have made themselves important, such as the formidable Mrs Gamart, and even natural and supernatural forces, too.Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.=== What’s it about? ===Spite. Small village politics. Exterminators and exterminees. Showing faith and hope in life spite of the gradual crushing nature of it.=== What’s it like? ===‘The Bookshop’ is a brief tale of life’s casual cruelty.Fitzgerald’s narrative is often gently humorous with an underlying viciousness and concludes with a deeply saddening ending.Held back and plotted against by useless solicitors, jealous neighbours and ambitious local politicians, Florence’s naivety is perhaps best illustrated by her simple belief that: ‘Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.’Ah, bless you, Florence; if only life were that simple.=== Favourite lines: ===Mr Gill smiles ‘as a toad does, because it has no other expression’.(On Milo North) ‘His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether’.=== England. 1959. ===Fitzgerald evokes a world in which power resides firmly with the upper classes and culture means nothing more to her most obviously ‘cultured’ characters than a boost to their social status.More crucially, this is a cruel world which is indifferent towards human endeavour - when it is not actively malign. (Florence must battle a poltergeist as well as malcontents and decaying buildings).=== Final thoughts ===I enjoyed Fitzgerald’s prose and relished the moments when Florence insisted on the vital nature of books and reading. Florence’s downfall is perhaps inevitable, despite the hopes raised along the way, and I suspect Fitzgerald’s final words, and Florence’s final attitude, will stay with me for a very long time.

[ashleytylerjohn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a tough one. It's ostensibly a very good book, but I (a) wasn't swept away with an overriding desire to read/finish it, and (b) was left in a somewhat disturbed state by it all. Which is probably a good thing, in one way, but it doesn't vault such a book into favourite status by any means. For someone who loves books (as I do) and generally wants their protagonists to succeed (I'm empathic!), this is a hard case, like animal lovers reading about doggy torture, or parents reading about terminal children.

I read this in response to a Goodreads request--I'd finished Hotel du Lac (where very little happens) and wondered who else wrote in a low-stakes kind of idiom. Fitzgerald was suggested, so I gave it a whirl. But while Brookner's book was at times humorous and delightful, and, say, Barbara Pym even more so, this one just felt bleak. Bleak and sad. Bleak, sad, and kind of cruel, like Lars Von Trier's Dogville but with a bookshop owner instead of Nicole Kidman.

When I wanted small, I guess I wanted small and sweet, not small and unbelievably depressing.

So three stars from me, sigh. But if she's written anything more cheerful, I'm definitely up for it!

[ecataldi-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I adore books about books and libraries and bookshops, so I had really high hopes for this novel. Plus it's going to be a movie, it's got to be good right? Wrong. This books started out with promise. A middle aged widow decides she wants to open up a bookshop in her sleepy little coastal town. What could go wrong? Everything. The townspeople were bitches. She had one good neighbor and one good assistant (who was eleven and adorable), but pretty much everyone else set out to make sure she failed. And just wait til you get to the bloody end. Save yourself the pain of disappointment and skip over this.

[jon1lambert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The prejudices and idiosyncrasies of provincial, small-town people are illustrated perfectly and amusingly in this short novel. They really do not deserve a bookshop or a bookseller in their town. Florence Green need not hang her head in shame.

[figgles_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lovely, gentle, sad book. I purchased it after seeing the film, and feeling that something was a little "off" with the adaptation. Reading the book confirmed that. Very little happens in the book - Florence Green, widow, uses her small capital to purchase The Old House (damp and haunted) and open a bookshop in a small East Anglian town. However she doesn't quite fit in and despite support from a number of other outsiders (Raven, Wally the sea scout, her small assistant Christine and the reclusive Mr Brundish) she is no match for the local power in the form of Mrs Gamart who cannot bear to see someone else succeed. Beautiful writing and very delicate and gentle. The film overplayed and exaggerated almost everything - read the book instead.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You can tell this book was written by a poet. It’s also obvious that the writer couldn’t be from the US. This novel of the daily life in a conservative British town is as stifling as the conservative politics behind the motives of the town leaders and hangers on.