The Bookshop: 02/28/25

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (1978) was shortlisted for a Booker and I swear is the Ur book for so many romances and cozy mysteries set in bookshops in the decades since. It's 1959 and kind-hearted widow Florence Green has gone to the small seaside town of Hardborough to open its only bookshop.

This short book follows Florence's ups and downs at the bookshop business over the course of about a year. She has problems with a poltergeist (known locally as a rapper), with the damp (sea sand in cement never fully cures), with the Gamart children (especially young Violet), and has some success selling Lolita.

Up until Lolita was introduced into the novel, I had hopes for Florence's bookshop. That book, though, I knew would spell disaster for the shop, although other reasons were found, mostly involving hiring too young of a shop clerk and keeping her from her schooling.

Throughout the book, though, I was most reminded of Little Shop of Happy Ever After Jenny Colgan (2016), renamed The Bookshop on the Corner, thus providing a flashing arrow back at Penelope Fitzgerald's novel. Colgan's romance reads like a fan-fiction rewrite to give Florence her HEA.

Five stars

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