The prominence of that book gives something ominous to the movie’s narrative direction. This item: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald Paperback 10.39 Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald Paperback 16.99 The Blue Flower: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald Paperback 16. He has an alarming habit of setting fire to the dustjackets of his books and so is predictably a very big fan of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Book: Purchased (4-4. She makes a success of it, largely by stocking Nabokov’s Lolita – thus incurring the envious displeasure of a local grande dame who had herself wanted the property for a self-aggrandising “arts centre”.Įmily Mortimer plays Florence Green, the woman of quietly polite heroism at the story’s centre, Patricia Clarkson sports an expression of unfathomably queenly displeasure as her enemy, Mrs Gamart, and Bill Nighy plays the bibliophile recluse, Mr Brundish, who admires Florence’s courage and takes her side in this battle. Penelope Fitzgerald delivers a well written novella which quietly, subtly and with humour gives a wonderful and poignant view of the best and worst of human nature.

Coixet has herself adapted this from the semi-autobiographical novel by Penelope Fitzgerald about an amiable young widow who comes to a remote coastal Suffolk town in the late 1950s, buys a dilapidated property there and enterprisingly converts it into a bookshop. She refuses the familiar grace notes of comedy and sugary romance in favour of something more awkward and angular. T he Spanish film-maker Isabel Coixet brings an interesting, unsentimental detachment to this odd tragicomedy of provincial life.

The bookshop penelope