Penelope Fitzgerald

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope FitzgeraldAcclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels – including the Booker Prize-winning ‘Offshore’ – and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most admired authors in Britain during the last century. ‘So I Have Thought Of You’ is an invaluable addition her distinguished oeuvre.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The...

A collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s short stories.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most highly-regarded writers on the English literary scene. Apart from Iris Murdoch, no other writer has been shortlisted so many times for the Booker. Her last novel, ‘The Blue Flower’, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim in Britain, America and Europe.This superb collection of stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From...

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 («though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated»). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the...

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...

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...

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...

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 façade hid painful truths – the Mews were penniless, two siblings had been...