ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography

Penelope Fitzgerald, one of the most quietly brilliant novelists of the twentieth century, was a great English writer whose career didn’t begin until she was nearly sixty. Her life was marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop’s palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. Her exquisite novels-short, spare masterpieces-would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature: the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee gives us this remarkable writer’s story.