The Bookshop, The Gate Of Angels And The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which she breathed new life. The Bookshop is a contemporary comedy of manners, set in a provincial town. InThe Gate of Angels romance is combined with the novel of ideas; while The Blue Flower revitalizes historical drama in a study of the eighteenth-century German writer Novalis. Fitzgerald being the genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched conceptual context, each book conjures up a different world in a few vivid pages which remain etched on the memory.

Penelope Fitzgerald

John Oliver Bayley

Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. 
 
Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. 
 
Human Voices takes place in the BBC where she worked during World War II. Both are vivid, intimate pictures of ordinary life, startling, sad and funny by turns, conjuring up complex worlds with the economy of poetry. 
 
The Beginning of Spring is an historical novel operating on a larger canvas. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English émigrés in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best ‘Russian’ novel of the twentieth century. 
 
Written with energy, passion and wit, and each quite different from the others, all three of these masterpieces reveal a lightness of touch with the most serious matters unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning Of Spring

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