An extremely pleasant surprise, this is a beautifully composed and penetrating short novel. Given it's immediacy and cinematic quality, I assumed it had been filmed at some point. It hasn't, so I wish someone would.

Bleak. But was interesting in that the setup was in the vein of cloyingly plucky quaint English tale, but instead ended up a bleak tale of a woman beaten by the forces-that-be in small-town-mindedness.

"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. ( )

Another book I recall liking, without remembering much about it. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/03/2023027-bookshop-penelope-fitzgerald.html ( )