The Bookshop cover art

The Bookshop

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Bookshop

By: Penelope Fitzgerald, David Nicholls - introduction
Narrated by: Eve Karpf, Stephanie Racine
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.06

Buy Now for £12.06

About this listen

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop.

Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Small Town & Rural Women's Fiction Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt

Critic reviews

‘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 Fitzgerald’s resources of odd people are impressively rich. Raven, the marshman, who ropes Florence in to hang on to an old horse’s 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 animated…On any reckoning, a marvellously piercing fiction.’ Valentine Cunningham, TLS
All stars
Most relevant
I was surprised and pleased to listen to this superb story from Penelope Fitzgerald, great.

unexpected pleasure

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Bottom lip story of a book shop seller and and it’s ephemeral mishaps with grim toady people

Book Mark

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The introduction prepped me for the ending but still wishing the evil witch could have got hers. There was this unrelenting slow inevitability to it, with maybe a few surprises.

Florence was valiant to the end. Her head was bloody but unbowed.

heartbreaking

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have been planning to read the Bookshop for some time but have simply never got around to it. I am so glad it is perfect audio book slow, gentle, funny and heartbrealking in a very short spaceof time. it si a very English book both in charachter and pace and I so loved it. The narration fits perfectly. Perhaps my favourite Audible so far.

Pretty much perfect

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A tale of one woman's failure but ambiguously, elliptically, beautifully and assuredly written. A treasure.

A wonderful novel

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews