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David Nicholls introduces Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop

Our ever-popular Rediscovered Classics series continues with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop. Her second novel after her 1977 debut The Golden Child, The Bookshop is the perfect introduction to Fitzgerald territory, a tale of a quiet determination in the face of parochial-but-steely resistance. It lost out on the Booker but paved the way for Fitzgerald’s success the following year with Offshore, her 1979 entry in a remarkable five-book run that firmly established her a very great, if late-flowering, British talent. The Midas touch of David Nicholls has seen each of his novels receive the type of acclaim and success most authors can only dream of. Starter for Ten, his debut of 2003, deftly set the Nicholls’ store – witty, knowing, writing prepared to look at relationships without being remotely mawkish – and in turn a series of bestsellers followed, including the all-conquering One Day of 2009. Happily, David is also one of the Waterstones family with a stint at our fine establishment at Notting Hill to his name: some of those experiences go into the following introduction to The Bookshop, which we exclusively reproduce here.

Tripfiction: Ten Books set in Bookshops

A list of ten books that feature bookshops by Tina Hartas - as we all know, the only thing better than a real book shop is a fictional one.