Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1978 this novel centres on Florence Green, a middle-aged widow and her attempts to run a bookshop in a small East Anglian town.
Charlotte Mew was a poet with a formidable reputation. Outwardly, she also was a dutiful daughter living at home with an ogre of a mother. However, proprieties had to be observed and no one could know that they had no money, that two siblings were insane...