Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's reviews, essays and autobiographical writings. This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A. E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M. R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E. H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one. This is a fantastically funny book – as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters.

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?

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Her warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently...haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: that a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

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 philosophy ("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 died of tuberculosis before they could marry. By the author of The Gates of Angels.

Young Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in 1912 Cambridge, falls in love with the dangerously mysterious Daisy, whom he awakens next to one morning after a freak accident.

Fitzgerald writes a story about the formidable proprietress of "Freddie's, " the Temple Stage School, which provides child actors for London's West End theaters, a promising child actor and his rival, and a man with wicked plans to rescue Freddie's from insolvency.

A biography of the four very different sons of the Evangelical Bishop of Manchester. Ronald Knox was the translator of the Bible and a Catholic priest, Eddie was the editor of Punch, Dillwyn worked as a cryptographer and Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest and active welfare worker.

A classically plotted British mystery centred around the arrival of the "Golden Child" at a London museum. Whilst the new exhibit lures thousands of curious spectators, it also becomes the sinister focus in a web of intrigue and murder.