The Bookshop ; The Gate of Angels ; The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Hardcover, 2003

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Knopf, c2003.

Description

"'The Bookshop' is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set in an isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens a bookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, and hostile townsfolk. 'The Gate of Angels' is an Edwardian romance within a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and to his all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disrupted by a nurse named Daisy. 'The Blue Flower,' which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical drama through the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romantic poet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair with a simple child-woman. These three novels all display Fitzgerald's characteristic wit, intellectual breadth, and narrative brilliance, applied to an array of traditional forms into which she breathed new life."--Book jacket.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member hemingwayok
[The Bookshop] Well, it reminded me a little of Thomas Hardy (Mayor of Casterbridge). The characters are a little under-developed. The plot seems to be the actual point. The action of the story - not how the characters change, but a general outline; told in almost a boring voice. The book also had
Show More
the [ Blue Flower ] , which made me crazy. I like the idea behind both plotlines - it shows how life moves on and cannot slow down. Maybe characters remain underdeveloped so you can see how unimportant they are in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it's a way to show us our place within it all.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
“Cambridge University in 1912 is on the threshold of world-changing discoveries in physics and more.A young man, rational Fred Fairly, the only son of a clergyman, is a junior fellow at the university’s smallest college, St. Angelicus, closed to women for 500 years. Fred’s experiences with
Show More
family, colleagues, and the mysterious, beautiful Daisy Saunders, who literally crashes into his life—bring him into a wider world and to some drastic modifications of his diehard beliefs and ambitions.

In this luminous and sublime novel, Fitzgerald creates a story from apparently irreconcilable strands, from the metaphysical to the religious, with ample mystery, romance, and history thrown in. Atoms and ghosts, angels and villains, certainty and chance, love and jealousy, reason and imagination, all figure prominently in the world within this novel. And a collision between any two of them can change the course of a life, or of life itself. The Gate of Angels is both intelligent and entertaining giving the reader a delightful ride through the world of Britain on the eve of the Great War.”
Show Less
LibraryThing member charlie68
All three stories manage to create settings and characters that envelope you and are sorry at having them end. Well-written and well thought out novels.

Language

Barcode

6312
Page: 0.4187 seconds