Short-listed for the Booker Prize

"A beautiful book, a perfect little gem." -- BBC Kaleidoscope

"A marvelously piercing fiction." -- Times Literary Supplement

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 so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne....