Penelope Fitzgerald

Man Booker Prize Finalist: This marvelous novel about an abandoned husband, set in Moscow a century ago, is bristling with wry comedy (Newsday). Short-listed for the Booker Prize "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 "Writing so precise and lilting it can make you shiver."...

Booker Prize—winning novelist Fitzgerald's crowning literary work centers on the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis and his love for the simple Sophie. The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe among the small towns and great universities of 18th-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his...

With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form,...

This “classically plotted British mystery” by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blue Flower is “leavened by a wicked sense of rapier-like humor” (The New York Times Book Review).
 
In The Golden Child, Penelope FitzGerald combines a deft comedy of manners with a tense mystery set in London's most refined institution: the Museum. When the glittering treasure of ancient Garamantia—the...

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...

England, 1959. Free-spirited widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative East Anglian coastal town. While bringing about a surprising cultural awakening through works by Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov, she earns the polite but ruthless opposition of a local grand dame (Patricia Clarkson) and the support and affection of a reclusive book loving widower (Bill Nighy). As Florence's obstacles amass and...