Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Literary Potpourri to discuss unread books sitting in our to-be-read piles.
For today's Shelf Control, I'm featuring my matched set of six of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels. Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a well-respected English novelist. She was nominated for the Booker Prize for The Bookshop, and later won for Offshore. She was also given the Golden PEN Award for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature" in 1999.
Many years ago, I read The Bookshop, and I remember thinking it to be an excellent, if somewhat sad, character study. When I saw these at our local used bookstore last year, I recognized her name and was struck by the beautiful copies, so I grabbed them. I've been planning on rereading The Bookshop first but have yet to do so.
Reviews of The Bookshop are somewhat mixed on Goodreads so I'm interested to see what I think of it now, some twenty years after my first reading. Have any of you read a novel by Fitzgerald? Would you recommend it?
