The Booker Prize-winning author’s final short story collection “shows her at the top of her form…exquisite”—with an introduction by A.S. Byatt (The Guardian, UK). Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the United Kingdom’s most highly-regarded contemporary authors. Her last novel, ‘The Blue Flower’, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim around the world. This posthumous collection of her short stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17th-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide ranging, enigmatic—and very funny. Each one is a miniature study of human behavior’s endless absurdity.
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.
Penelope Fitzgerald's final masterpiece. One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.
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.
In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside-down.
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
The eccentric residents of a houseboat community along the Thames in London float between loneliness and connection in this Booker Prize–winning novel. On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets. It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Fitzgerald’s greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed “flawless.” This edition includes a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst. “Dazzling. The novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor.” —Washington Post “A small and very bright treasure.” —Kirkus Reviews
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. Winner of a 1997 Booker Prize.
A British radio station struggles through the London blitz, in a “wonderful” novel of World War II England (A.S. Byatt), by a veteran of the BBC. The nation is listening. It’s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it’s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs are only part of the chaos faced by the staff. There’s a battle for control between two program directors—one recklessly randy, the other efficient. Their comely assistant is suffering the pangs of unrequited love; an unwed mother is resisting the impending birth of her baby; and an exiled French general takes to the airwaves demanding Britain’s surrender. Then there’s the concert hall itself—a makeshift shelter for the displaced that quickly becomes a hotbed for quick trysts, bloody brawls, private wars between the sexes, political grandstanding, pointless deaths, and overriding fear, as the news unfolds just outside the building’s vulnerable walls. Inspired by the Booker Prize–winning author’s own wartime experiences at the BBC, Human Voices is a novel at once “funny, touching, and authentic” (Sunday Times, London). “Made me laugh out loud as I have hardly done since Cold Comfort Farm. It is extraordinary and immensely praiseworthy that a book with such an ultimately serious idea can be so brilliantly funny.” —Country Life “A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.” —New Criterion
Frank Reid is a struggling printer in Moscow. On the eve of the Revolution, his wife returns to her native England, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. How does a reasonable man like Frank cope? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his bookkeeper? And should he, in his wife's absence, resist his desire for his lovely Russian housemaid? How can anyone know how to live the right life?
A London theater school resists the cultural shifts of the 1960s in this novel by the Booker Prize-winning author—with an introduction by Simon Callow. It is the 1960s, and London’s West End theaters all rely on Freddie Wentworth, the formidable proprietress of the Temple Stage School, to supply them with child actors for their productions of everything from Shakespeare to musicals to Christmas pantomimes. Of unknown age and origin, Freddie is a skirt-swathed enigma—a woman who by sheer force of character has turned herself and her school into a national institution. But as the cultural revolution transforms London, not even Freddie can keep its influence at bay. Basing this intimate novel on her experiences teaching at London’s Italia Conti stage school, Penelope Fitzgerald spins the story of Jonathan, a child actor of great promise, and his slick rival Mattie; Joey Blatt, who has wicked plans to rescue Freddie's from insolvency; and Freddie herself, who faces an increasingly urgent choice between her principles and the school’s survival.
Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, The Golden Child, combines a deft comedy of manners with a classic mystery set in London's most refined institution--the museum. When the glittering treasure of ancient Garamantia, the golden child, is delivered to the museum, a web of intrigue tightens around its personnel, especially the hapless museum officer Waring Smith. While prowling the halls one night, Waring is nearly strangled. Two suspicious deaths ensue, and only the cryptic hieroglyphics of the Garamantes can bring an end to the mayhem. Fitzgerald has an unerring eye for human nature, and this satirical look at the art world delivers a terrifically witty read.
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.
In her final book--published posthumously--Fitzgerald presents several very strange pasts, her narratives ranging from the 17th century to the late 20th century. The title tale, set in New Zealand in 1852, resembles a cautionary fable about a spinster and an escaped con. But in Fitzgerald's hands, it is infinitely more.
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.
A fictionalized biography of the 18th Century German poet, Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, who wrote under the nom de plume, Novalis. The novel centers on his philosopy ("My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.") and on his romance with Sophie von Kuhn, 12, who became his muse, but who tied of tuberculosis before they could marry. By the author of The Gates of Angels.
The only complete biography in print of this famous contemporary of William Morris, best known as the designer of stained glass and tapestries for Morris and Co.
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