{"product_id":"9780701184957-secondhand-penelope-fitzgerald-a-life","title":"Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life","description":"Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel  Offshore  in 1979, and her last work,  The Blue Flower , was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely- Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald s life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence- a private form of heroism. Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outs","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49027685253339,"sku":"9780701184957-SECONDHAND","price":20.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/8b3e2584-ad25-4a62-9be5-0b8cb1bd8d16.jpg?v=1785091813","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/9780701184957-secondhand-penelope-fitzgerald-a-life","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}