Most Popular Books by Penelope Fitzgerald

Man Booker Prize Finalist: This “marvelous novel” about an abandoned husband, set in Moscow a century ago, is “bristling with wry comedy” (Newsday). March 1913. Moscow is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. English painter Frank Reid returns from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she’ll ever come back. All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children. Into Frank’s life comes Lisa Ivanovna, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the point of seeming simple. But is she? And why has Frank’s bookkeeper, Selwyn Crane, gone to such lengths to bring these two together? From a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this novel, with a new introduction by Andrew Miller, author of Pure, is filled with “writing so precise and lilting it can make you shiver” (Los Angeles Times). “Fitzgerald was the author of several slim, perfect novels. The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring both had me abuzz for days the first time I read them. She was curiously perfect.” —Teju Cole, author of Open City

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world. The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975 at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades she published three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of short stories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in one volume. The Bookshop is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set in an isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens a bookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, and hostile townsfolk. The Gate of Angels is an Edwardian romance within a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and to his all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disrupted by a nurse named Daisy. The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical drama through the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romantic poet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair with a simple child-woman. These three novels all display Fitzgerald’s characteristic wit, intellectual breadth, and narrative brilliance, applied to an array of traditional forms into which she breathed new life.

Fitzgerald writes a story about the formidable proprietress of "Freddie''s, " the Temple Stage School, which provides child actors for London''s West End theaters, a promising child actor and his rival, and a man with wicked plans to rescue Freddie''s from insolvency.

“A delectable comedy of manners” set in 1950s Florence, by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Bookshop (The Boston Globe). It’s 1955, and Italy is still struggling a decade after the end of World War II. So are the Ridolfis, a Florentine family of long and fading noble lineage. Like their decrepit villa, they’ve seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality—however impulsive and perilously naïve. Chiara has set her heart and her future on Salvatore Rossi, a brilliant, penniless young doctor and bull-headed son of a Communist, who has erased both politics and romance from his list of priorities. With her plans stymied, Chiara calls on her resourceful and meddlesome British girlfriend, Barney, to help make an impossible match. Now, out of good intentions and the most innocent of instincts, two guileless friends are going to make a series of astonishingly wrong moves in the name of love. From a winner of multiple major literary awards who was called “the best English novelist of her time” by Julian Barnes, Innocence is a novel “not just about Italians in love but of living and loving for all humans” (The Times). “As intoxicating as a shot of aged brandy.” —The Washington Post

With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald''s first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Concise, comic, biting, and mischievous, they are vintage Fitzgerald. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power--by wealth, status, or class--and those who, deceptively, are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.

This “classically plotted British mystery” by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blue Flower is “leavened by a wicked sense of rapier-like humor” (The New York Times Book Review). In The Golden Child, Penelope FitzGerald combines a deft comedy of manners with a tense mystery set in London''s most refined institution: the Museum. When the glittering treasure of ancient Garamantia—the Golden Child—is delivered, the Museum is guaranteed an exhibition as popular as King Tut. But soon a web of intrigue tightens around the Museum’s personnel, especially the hapless junior officer Waring Smith. Then, while prowling the halls one night, Waring is nearly strangled. Two suspicious deaths ensue. And as a murderous conspiracy is traced all the way to the Kremlin, only the cryptic hieroglyphics of the Garamantes can bring an end to the mayhem. Along the way, everyone from art critics to the police and “a few nicely Wodehousian oddballs” fall under Fitzgerald’s mercilessly satirical eye (Kirkus).

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald

Here is a biography whose eccentric genius perfectly matches that of its subjects. Penelope Fitzgerald tells the lives of four extraordinary Englishmen–her father and his brothers–with style and wit. Here is the story of a deeply fascinating family mind, shared by four brothers and passed along to their remarkable biographer.

A posthumous collection of literary essays explores the "afterlife" of the writing community, defined as a legacy experienced in the minds and hearts of their readers; in a volume that includes introductions to major works of literature, reviews of fellow authors, and explorations of lesser-known writers. From the late novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, a collection of essays-almost all of them unknown to her countless American admirers-on books, travel, and her own life and work. A good book, wrote John Milton, is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. In this generous posthumous collection of her literary essays and reviews, Penelope Fitzgerald celebrates the life beyond life of dozens of master-spirits--their afterlife not only in the pages of their works but in the minds of their readers, critics, and biographers. Here are Fitzgerald''s brilliant introductions to the classics--Jane Austen''s Emma, George Eliot''s Middlemarch, the works of Mrs. Oliphant--as well as considerations of recent novels by Barbara Pym, Carol Shields, Roddy Doyle, and Amy Tan. Here too are reviews of several late-twentieth-century literary biographies, including Richard Holmes''s Coleridge, A. N. Wilson''s C. S. Lewis, and Martin Stannard''s Evelyn Waugh-reviews that together form a memorable criticism both of life and the art of life-writing.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer - full of wit, feeling and illumination. Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald''s reviews, essays and autobiographical writings. This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doy≤ on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old a≥ and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one. This is a fantastically funny book - as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘The Blue Flower’, turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones.

Un museo londinense expone por primera vez los tesoros de los garamantes, un antiguo pueblo del norte de África, y los visitantes aguardan en filas eternas para ver las dos piezas más célebres de la exposición: la madeja y el niño de oro. Se dice que el niño está maldito, y los rumores alzan el vuelo cuando se produce un intento de asesinato en el museo. La llegada de la policía coincide con la visita de dos prestigiosos académicos, momento en que el director del museo debe enfrentarse a una red de intrigas que se va complicando entre celos, ambiciones, rencores y secretos mal guardados. Con la Guerra Fría como telón de fondo, Penelope Fitzgerald arremete sin piedad contra las élites culturales, políticas y universitarias. Presuntas falsificaciones, sospechas de espionaje e intereses políticos se funden en una novela trepidante, con elementos de misterio y comedia costumbrista. Una carga de dinamita literaria colocada estratégicamente en los cimientos de una de las instituciones más refinadas de Londres: la de los museos --

Florence Green erwirbt in Hardborough, einem verschlafenen Dorf an der Küste Ostenglands, das Old House als zukünftiges Domizil für ihre Buchhandlung. Dass das Gebäude anscheinend von einem Poltergeist besessen und bis auf die Grundmauern feucht ist, bringt sie von ihrem Vorhaben ebensowenig ab wie die Tatsache, dass sie von finanziellen Dingen keine Ahnung hat. Voller Schwung stürzt sie sich in die Vorbereitungen und stattet ihre Buchhandlung liebevoll aus. Die Einwohner des kleinen Städtchens begegnen dem Unternehmen zunächst mit Skepsis, bald stellen sich jedoch erste Stammkunden ein. Als Florence Green aber dann ein gerade erschienenes Buch eines bis dahin unbekannten Autors, Vladimir Nabokov, verkauft, ist die Aufregung groß und weitet sich zu einem Skandal aus ...

»Was ich gesucht, habe ich gefunden, / Was ich fand, das fand auch mich. « Friedrich von Hardenberg, besser bekannt als Novalis, ist 22, als er Sophie von Kühn erstmals trifft – eine Viertelstunde, die über sein Leben entschieden hat, wie er später seinem Bruder gestehen wird. Hals über Kopf hat er sich verliebt und verlobt sich schon bald mit »Söphgen«. Für den romantischen Dichter ist die viel Jüngere seine blaue Blume, die Verkörperung seiner Poesie und all seiner Sehnsucht. Doch das Glück steht unter keinem guten Stern: Sophie erkrankt an Tuberkulose ... Penelope Fitzgerald erzählt die dramatische Liebesgeschichte des Paares, dessen Schicksal bis heute berührt, und sie zeigt Novalis in einem neuen Licht.

Lo scrittore e saggista inglese Sebastian Faulks ha descritto in modo persuasivo l’esperienza donata da un libro della Fitzgerald: «Leggere un romanzo di Penelope Fitzgerald è come salire su un’automobile per una corsa un po’ speciale. Ogni cosa è al massimo della qualità – il motore, la carrozzeria, gli interni, tutto vi dà un senso di affidamento. Poi, dopo qualche chilometro, qualcuno scaglia il volante fuori dal finestrino». L’impressione può estendersi immediatamente ai suoi racconti. Ne scrisse pochi preferendo la forma romanzo, composti per occasioni e riviste e questa raccolta, pubblicata postuma, li riunisce quasi tutti. Spesso, come scrive Masolino D’Amico nell’Introduzione, sembrano contenere un intero romanzo compresso, tanta è la ricchezza di temi e personaggi.

Novela finalista del Booker Prize, La librería es una delicada aventura tragicómica, una obra maestra de la entomología librera. Florence Green vive en un minúsculo pueblo costero de Suffolk que en 1959 está literalmente apartado del mundo, y que se caracteriza justamente por «lo que no tiene». Florence decide abrir una pequeña librería, que será la primera del pueblo. Adquiere así un edificio que lleva años abandonado, comido por la humedad y que incluso tiene su propio y caprichoso poltergeist. Pero pronto se topará con la resistencia muda de las fuerzas vivas del pueblo que, de un modo cortés pero implacable, empezarán a acorralarla. Florence se verá obligada entonces a contratar como ayudante a una niña de diez años, de hecho la única que no sueña con sabotear su negocio. Cuando alguien le sugiere que ponga a la venta la polémica edición de Olympia Press de Lolita de Nabokov, se desencadena en el pueblo un terremoto sutil pero devastador.