Penelope Fitzgerald published her first novel, The Golden Child, in 1977, when she was sixty years old, and since then she has published eight additional novels to increasing praise and prizes. Three of those—The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988), and The Gate of Angels (1990)—were short—listed for the Booker Prize. She was awarded the Booker Prize for Offshore (1979). She has also written three biographies. Fitzgerald is now regarded as "one of the finest and most enter-taining novelists writing in England today."(The Observer)

Prior to her career as a novelist, Fitzgerald led a varied pro-fessional life. In addition to raising three children, she worked as journalist, in the Ministry of Food, at the BBC, and as a teacher. These experiences, as well as her travels, provided a wonderfully rich harvest of settings and characters from which she later crafted her remarkable fictions. 

Among her abiding themes are the courage and determination of innocence in the face of sometimes monstrous adversity, the rewards of courageous eccentricity or creative effort, survival in terms of one's own sense of self, and the sometimes tiny sources of both grand achievement and terrible loss.

In addition to having perfected a style graced by wit, keen perception, and mastery of language, Fitzgerald has written a series of "dry, shrewd, sympathetic, and sharply economical books [that] are almost disreputably enjoyable." (New York Times Book Review)

Books by Penelope Fitzgerald

Offshore

by Penelope Fitzgerald