A woman opens a bookshop in a small town in Suffolk in 1959. There’s not much more to say about the plot of Penelope Fitzgerald’s lovely story first published in 1978, but don’t be fooled into assuming this is one of those small-scale, minor provincial novels. The Bookshop is a tiny, unforgettable gem. Florence Green’s ambition and independence expose the class tensions, power structures, and sexism of small-town life, but satire and polemic aren’t Fitzgerald’s main business here. The Bookshop is about loneliness and disappointment and how we cope with them, and about how destructive petty resentments can be.

Penelope Fitzgerald was awarded the Booker Prize in 1979 and died in 2000. The Bookshop was adapted into a film in 2017 starring Bill Nighy and others. In one of those strange coincidences, Nighy stood next to me when I bought my copy of the novel in London earlier this year.