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The Bookshop

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About this listen

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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 as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Small Town & Rural Women's Fiction Heartfelt

Critic reviews

‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks

‘Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer.’ David Nicholls

‘Its stylishness, and this low-voiced lack of emphasis are a pleasure throughout, its moral and human positions invariably sympathetic. But it is astringent too: no self-pity in its self-effacing heroine, who in a world of let-downs and put-downs and poltergeists, keeps her spirit bright and her book-stock miraculously dry in the damp, seeping East Anglian landscape.’ Isabel Quigley, Financial Times

‘Penelope Fitzgerald’s resources of odd people are impressively rich. Raven, the marshman, who ropes Florence in to hang on to an old horse’s tongue while he files the teeth; old Brundish, secretive as a badger, slow as a gorse bush. And this is not just a gallery of quirky still lives; these people appear in vignettes, wryly, even comically animated…On any reckoning, a marvellously piercing fiction.’ Valentine Cunningham, TLS
All stars
Most relevant
I was surprised and pleased to listen to this superb story from Penelope Fitzgerald, great.

unexpected pleasure

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Bottom lip story of a book shop seller and and it’s ephemeral mishaps with grim toady people

Book Mark

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The introduction prepped me for the ending but still wishing the evil witch could have got hers. There was this unrelenting slow inevitability to it, with maybe a few surprises.

Florence was valiant to the end. Her head was bloody but unbowed.

heartbreaking

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This is a tale with hidden depths and characters that are far more complex than they at first appear.
Set in a small, rural town in the late 1950s The Bookshop tells the story of a widow's struggle to establish a business in a community riven by class divisions and clashing ideas on the need for an Arts Centre.
The writing is sublime and the simplicity of the story is one of its strengths. But it is a novel that is full of thought-provoking themes - class, the value of education, the nature of work, the machinations of local politics, the danger of gossip, manipulation of people, what it is to be an outsider.
The ending is heart-breaking and I was very moved by the bookseller's plight. A brilliant novel.

Wonderful storytelling

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Thoroughly enjoyable, listened all in one go. I would recommend not listening to the forward beforehand. Felt a bit like a book of a film rather than the other way around but, I'd like to watch the film now.

Mixed feelings

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