Audioraamat: Bookshop

Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window. Sebastian Faulks



Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer. David Nicholls



Its stylishness, and this low-voiced lack of emphasis are a pleasure throughout, its moral and human positions invariably sympathetic. But it is astringent too: no self-pity in its self-effacing heroine, who in a world of let-downs and put-downs and poltergeists, keeps her spirit bright and her book-stock miraculously dry in the damp, seeping East Anglian landscape. Isabel Quigley, Financial Times



Penelope Fitzgeralds resources of odd people are impressively rich. Raven, the marshman, who ropes Florence in to hang on to an old horses tongue while he files the teeth; old Brundish, secretive as a badger, slow as a gorse bush. And this is not just a gallery of quirky still lives; these people appear in vignettes, wryly, even comically animatedOn any reckoning, a marvellously piercing fiction. Valentine Cunningham, TLS