Author(s): Penelope Fitzgerald

Fiction

Set in Russia 1913, Frank Reid arrives home from work on a day just like any other to find that his wife has left him. How should he cope? This text is the story of how the family copes with this unexpected event, set against a turbulent political backdrop. Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which - The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels - were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And she won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the `Book of the Year`. It won America`s National Book Critics` Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership. A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers - a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three. ++ Shortlisted, Booker Prize ++ Paperback (B-Format)