<div>"Dazzling. The novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor." &#8212;Washington PostPenelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize&#8211;winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames. This edition includes a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.On the Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tides of the Thames.There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, an abandoned wife and mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore, whose domestic predicament, as it deepens, will draw this disparate community together.A novel the Booker judges deemed "flawless," Offshore is one of Fitzgerald&#8217;s greatest triumphs.</div>

Offshore

<div>Shortlisted for the Booker Prize: A novel of two &ldquo;wonderful characters&rdquo; who meet by accident in Edwardian England, and fall inconveniently in love (The Washington Post). In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge&rsquo;s best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger&mdash;fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications&mdash;not only of the heart but also of the head&mdash;as Fred and Daisy take up each other&rsquo;s education and turn each other&rsquo;s philosophies upside down. From the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, this story of an unlikely and possibly doomed romance is a &ldquo;deft comedy of manners . . . Fitzgerald&rsquo;s elegant prose shines with intelligence and subtle wit . . . Her flair for well-drawn eccentric characters will appeal to fans of Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym&rdquo; (Library Journal). &ldquo;A singular accomplishment.&rdquo; &mdash;Boston Globe &ldquo;Powerfully bewitching.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times</div>

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The Gate of Angels

<div>A British radio station struggles through the London blitz, in a &ldquo;wonderful&rdquo; novel of World War II England (A.S. Byatt), by a veteran of the BBC. The nation is listening. It&rsquo;s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it&rsquo;s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs are only part of the chaos faced by the staff. There&rsquo;s a battle for control between two program directors&mdash;one recklessly randy, the other efficient. Their comely assistant is suffering the pangs of unrequited love; an unwed mother is resisting the impending birth of her baby; and an exiled French general takes to the airwaves demanding Britain&rsquo;s surrender. Then there&rsquo;s the concert hall itself&mdash;a makeshift shelter for the displaced that quickly becomes a hotbed for quick trysts, bloody brawls, private wars between the sexes, political grandstanding, pointless deaths, and overriding fear, as the news unfolds just outside the building&rsquo;s vulnerable walls. Inspired by the Booker Prize&ndash;winning author&rsquo;s own wartime experiences at the BBC, Human Voices is a novel at once &ldquo;funny, touching, and authentic&rdquo; (Sunday Times, London). &ldquo;Made me laugh out loud as I have hardly done since Cold Comfort Farm. It is extraordinary and immensely praiseworthy that a book with such an ultimately serious idea can be so brilliantly funny.&rdquo; &mdash;Country Life &ldquo;A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.&rdquo; &mdash;New Criterion</div>

Human Voices

<div>&ldquo;A delectable comedy of manners&rdquo; set in 1950s Florence, by the Man Booker Prize&ndash;winning author of The Bookshop (The Boston Globe). It&rsquo;s 1955, and Italy is still struggling a decade after the end of World War II. So are the Ridolfis, a Florentine family of long and fading noble lineage. Like their decrepit villa, they&rsquo;ve seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality&mdash;however impulsive and perilously na&iuml;ve. Chiara has set her heart and her future on Salvatore Rossi, a brilliant, penniless young doctor and bull-headed son of a Communist, who has erased both politics and romance from his list of priorities. With her plans stymied, Chiara calls on her resourceful and meddlesome British girlfriend, Barney, to help make an impossible match. Now, out of good intentions and the most innocent of instincts, two guileless friends are going to make a series of astonishingly wrong moves in the name of love. From a winner of multiple major literary awards who was called &ldquo;the best English novelist of her time&rdquo; by Julian Barnes, Innocence is a novel &ldquo;not just about Italians in love but of living and loving for all humans&rdquo; (The Times). &ldquo;As intoxicating as a shot of aged brandy.&rdquo; &mdash;The Washington Post</div>

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Innocence

<div>Man Booker Prize Finalist: This &ldquo;marvelous novel&rdquo; about an abandoned husband, set in Moscow a century ago, is &ldquo;bristling with wry comedy&rdquo; (Newsday). March 1913. Moscow is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. English painter Frank Reid returns from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she&rsquo;ll ever come back. All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children. Into Frank&rsquo;s life comes Lisa Ivanovna, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the point of seeming simple. But is she? And why has Frank&rsquo;s bookkeeper, Selwyn Crane, gone to such lengths to bring these two together? From a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this novel, with a new introduction by Andrew Miller, author of Pure, is filled with &ldquo;writing so precise and lilting it can make you shiver&rdquo; (Los Angeles Times). &ldquo;Fitzgerald was the author of several slim, perfect novels. The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring both had me abuzz for days the first time I read them. She was curiously perfect.&rdquo; &mdash;Teju Cole, author of Open City</div>

The Beginning of Spring

<div>This &ldquo;classically plotted British mystery&rdquo; by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blue Flower is &ldquo;leavened by a wicked sense of rapier-like humor&rdquo; (The New York Times Book Review). In The Golden Child, Penelope FitzGerald combines a deft comedy of manners with a tense mystery set in London&#39;s most refined institution: the Museum. When the glittering treasure of ancient Garamantia&mdash;the Golden Child&mdash;is delivered, the Museum is guaranteed an exhibition as popular as King Tut. But soon a web of intrigue tightens around the Museum&rsquo;s personnel, especially the hapless junior officer Waring Smith. Then, while prowling the halls one night, Waring is nearly strangled. Two suspicious deaths ensue. And as a murderous conspiracy is traced all the way to the Kremlin, only the cryptic hieroglyphics of the Garamantes can bring an end to the mayhem. Along the way, everyone from art critics to the police and &ldquo;a few nicely Wodehousian oddballs&rdquo; fall under Fitzgerald&rsquo;s mercilessly satirical eye (Kirkus).</div>

The Golden Child

<div>The Booker Prize-winning author&rsquo;s final short story collection &ldquo;shows her at the top of her form&hellip;exquisite&rdquo;&mdash;with an introduction by A.S. Byatt (The Guardian, UK). Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the United Kingdom&rsquo;s most highly-regarded contemporary authors. Her last novel, &lsquo;The Blue Flower&rsquo;, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim around the world. This posthumous collection of her short stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17th-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide ranging, enigmatic&mdash;and very funny. Each one is a miniature study of human behavior&rsquo;s endless absurdity.</div>

The Means of Escape

<div>A London theater school resists the cultural shifts of the 1960s in this novel by the Booker Prize-winning author&mdash;with an introduction by Simon Callow.It is the 1960s, and London&rsquo;s West End theaters all rely on Freddie Wentworth, the formidable proprietress of the Temple Stage School, to supply them with child actors for their productions of everything from Shakespeare to musicals to Christmas pantomimes. Of unknown age and origin, Freddie is a skirt-swathed enigma&mdash;a woman who by sheer force of character has turned herself and her school into a national institution. But as the cultural revolution transforms London, not even Freddie can keep its influence at bay. Basing this intimate novel on her experiences teaching at London&rsquo;s Italia Conti stage school, Penelope Fitzgerald spins the story of Jonathan, a child actor of great promise, and his slick rival Mattie; Joey Blatt, who has wicked plans to rescue Freddie&#39;s from insolvency; and Freddie herself, who faces an increasingly urgent choice between her principles and the school&rsquo;s survival.</div>

Penelope Fitzgerald
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Books By Penelope Fitzgerald (8 Books)

Offshore

The Gate of Angels

Human Voices

Innocence

The Beginning of Spring

The Golden Child

The Means of Escape

At Freddie's

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Penelope FitzgeraldFollow this author