Beautiful Chiara is the last of the Ridolfi, a Florentine family of long lineage and eccentric habits. She is smitten with Salvatore, a brilliant but penniless doctor, a rational man who wants nothin
In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger - fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generous working-class
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business s
In the 1960s, "Freddie's" was the common name for the Temple Stage School, which supplied London's West End theaters with children for roles in everything from Shakespeare to musicals to the Christma
When the Golden Child, the ancient gold-covered corpse of the African ruler of Garamantia, arrives at a London museum, it instantly becomes the sinister focus of a web of intrigue spun by all manner
The "human voices" of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel are those of an eccentric group of broadcasters at the BBC in London during the air raids of World War II. When British listeners tuned in to the Nin
Frank Reid is a struggling printer in Moscow. On the eve of the Revolution, his wife returns to her native England, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. How does a reasonable man li
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard,
In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple ch
