Find A Book

Shopping cart

Shopping cart

The Blue Flower: A Novel (Paperback)

The Blue Flower: A Novel By Penelope Fitzgerald Cover Image
$16.99
Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days

Description


A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER in Fiction. Booker Prize–winning novelist Fitzgerald's crowning literary work centers on the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis and his love for the simple Sophie.

The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe among the small towns and great universities of 18th-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father's permission to wed his "heart's heart," his "spirit's guide"—a plain, simple child named Sophievon Kühn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?

Their rationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one's own fate— these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor.

“An extraordinary imagining . . . an original masterpiece.”—Financial Times

"An astonishing book...Fitzgerald's greatest triumph."—New York Times Book Review

About the Author


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 New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, "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 New York Times 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?"


Product Details
ISBN: 9780544359451
ISBN-10: 0544359453
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: October 14th, 2014
Pages: 320
Language: English

The Norwich Bookstore is locally owned, community focused, and proudly independent!