The Bookshop
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
The Bookshop
Buy Now for £8.99
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Narrated by:
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Eve Karpf
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Stephanie Racine
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.
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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
unexpected pleasure
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Book Mark
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Florence was valiant to the end. Her head was bloody but unbowed.
heartbreaking
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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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Mixed feelings
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