3.0
The Gate of Angels
ByPublisher Description
In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger—fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications—not only of the heart but also of the head—as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside down.
From the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, this story of an unlikely and possibly doomed romance is a "deft comedy of manners . . . Fitzgerald's elegant prose shines with intelligence and subtle wit . . . Her flair for well-drawn eccentric characters will appeal to fans of Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym" (
).
"A singular accomplishment." —
"Powerfully bewitching." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Gate of Angels Reviews
3.0
“This book was phenomenal. How Fitzgerald is able to explore so relevant themes with so little effort but very efficiently is so powerful.
Yes, the main plot of the story is the meeting of these two people very different from one another, yet the advance of the science in the beginning of the 20th century, women's suffrage and the entry of women in spaces that until then only belonged to men, the imminent perception of the outbreak of war (just to name a few themes) are always subtly present in the narrative.
It's a short book where nothing really happens, but that demands a lot of your attention.
I think this is would be the perfect pick for a book club because you have so much to discuss in so little number of pages, a writing with so much symbolism, it's actually brilliant.”
About Penelope Fitzgerald
PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both the
and the
. In 1979, her novel
won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for
. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60s, her career was praised as "the best argument . . . for a publishing debut made late in life" (
). She told the
, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn't. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her
obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"
Other books by Penelope Fitzgerald
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