Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is on any reckoning a marvellously piercing fiction. It is (of course) about a woman's resilience under stress. And the duress Florence Green is put under when she opens a bookshop in an islanded Suffolk seaside place is all the more harrowing because of its neighbourly, gossipy ordinariness, its roots in the well-intentioned but rival cultural aspirations of the genteel Mrs Gamart, the General's wife. What happens is sharply localized.

[There] are the small circumstances that give rise naturally to a Hardy-like gothic, complete with a rapping poltergeist, and to a fiction where character inevitably comes to "characters". And Penelope Fitzgerald's resources of odd people are impressively rich.

Further, and more seriously still, The Bookshop—fiercely, rousingly moral—analyses the operations of power. Mrs Gamart wants Florence's Old House bookshop for an Arts Centre and, frustrated, hectors and schemes until by dint of solicitors...