Bøker av Penelope Fitzgerald

From the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore', 'The Blue Flower' and 'Innocence' comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank's wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican chaplain's wife? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his chief book-keeper? How do people live together, and what happens when, sometimes, they don't?

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is "a marvelously piercing fiction" (Times Literary Supplement), short-listed for the Booker Prize.With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day. 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. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.Basis for the major motion picture starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEEThe previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer - full of wit, feeling and illumination.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.

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.'I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire' Edward Burne-JonesEdward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful biography charts his life from humble beginnings in Birmingham as the son of an unsuccessful framer, through a transformative period at Oxford, where he met his close friend and collaborator William Morris, and on to the apprenticeship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would shape his artistic vision.His work harks back to an Arthurian England - an Arcadia that offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and on a deeply personal level provided respite from his ever-present melancholia. This is an illuminating portrait of a fascinating figure - artistic genius, doting father, troubled husband - written with all Penelope Fitzgerald's characteristic sympathy and insight.

This Booker Prize-winning novel from the author of 'The Blue Flower' is set among the houseboat community of the Thames.'Offshore' is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither...Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can't get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, 'Offshore' offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and 'The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the story of her remarkable family.When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them.'Penelope Fitzgerald turns her novelist's gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers.Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, 'Dilly', a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Enigma code and in so doing, is estimated to have shortened the Second World War by six months. Wilfred became a priest and welfare worker in the East End of London. Ronald was Roman Catholic chaplain to Oxford University's student body, preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible.A homage to a long-forgotten world and a fascinating account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian.

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.

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.

Penelope Fitzgerald's fascinating portrait of the tragic poet and her life at the heart of the Bloomsbury set.Thomas Hardy hailed her as 'far and away the best living woman poet'; the formidable Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was the writer of some of the best English poems of the twentieth century.In her private life, to all appearances, Mew was a dutiful daughter living at home with her elderly mother. But this respectable facade hid painful truths - the Mews were penniless, two siblings had been declared insane and Charlotte was secretly lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted frustration. Despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by swallowing household disinfectant.In this gripping portrait, Penelope Fitzgerald brings all her novelist's skills into play, giving us touching story, and an entire life's emotional history.

The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald's first work of fiction, is a classically plotted British mystery centred around the arrival of the 'Golden Child' at a London museum.Far be it for the hapless Waring Smith, junior officer at a prominent London museum, to expect any kind of thanks for his work on the opening of the year's biggest exhibition - The Golden Child. But when he is nearly strangled to death by a shadowy assailant and packed off to Moscow to negotiate with a mysterious curator, he finds himself at the centre of a sinister web of conspiracy, fraudulent artifacts and murder...Her first novel and a comic gem, 'The Golden Child' is written with the sharp wit and unerring eye for human foibles that mark Penelope Fitzgerald out as a truly inimitable author, and one to be cherished.

From the Booker Prize-wining author of 'Offshore' and 'the Blue Flower' - this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel centres on Cambridge Fellow Fred Fairly's search for a rational riposte to love.In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot ("e;though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated"e;). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the universal problem known in Cambridge at the time as 'the absurdity of the Mind-Body Relationship'. To Fred this is tormenting rather than absurd. The young woman beside him when he wakes up one evening in the Wrayburns' spare bedroom might help resolve it, but how can he tell if she is quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything, and indeed he thinks it is. But scientists make mistakes.The Gate of Angels is a funny, touching and inspiring look at male-female relationships and the problems caused by thinking just a little too much.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore', 'The Blue Flower' and 'Innocence' comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted story of books and busybodies in East Anglia.This, Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel, was her first to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is set in a small East Anglian coastal town, where Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. 'She had a kind heart, but that is not much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.'Hardborough becomes a battleground, as small towns so easily do. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. This is a story for anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.

From the Booker Prize-winner of 'Offshore' comes this entertaining tale of a chaotic stage school and its singular headmistress. With a new introduction by Simon Callow.It is the 1960s, in London's West End, and Freddie is the formidable proprietress of the Temple Stage School. Of unknown age and provenance, Freddie is a skirt-swathed enigma - a woman who by sheer force of character and single-minded thrust has turned herself and her school into a national institution. Anyone who is anyone must know Freddie.At Freddie's is a wickedly droll comedy of the theatre and its terminally eccentric devotees.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore', 'The Blue Flower' and 'Innocence', this is a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC - as elsewhere - some had to fail and some had to die.It does not pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House in those years, but 'one is left with the sensation', as William Boyd said, reviewing it in the 'London Magazine', 'that this is what it was really like.'

Stunning modern new cover reissue of one of Penelope Fitzgerald's best-loved novelsInnocence is set in the 1950s, when Italy was picking up the pieces after the war. Chiara Ridolfi is the guileless daughter of a decrepit Italian family. Barney is her practical English girlfriend, who can sum up a man, she says, in one firm hand-grip. Salvatore is a penniless doctor from the south, who thinks he is proof against politics, social conscience and tenderness. Chiara's cousin, Cesare, says very little, which gives him time to think...