This book has been translated into Persian by Mohammad-Mahdi Qasemloo. Tehran-based Alborz Publishing has released 'The Bookshop ' in 126 pages.

The novel, set mainly in 1959, follows Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk (a thinly-disguised version of Southwold).

The location she chooses is the Old House, an abandoned, damp property said to be haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). After many sacrifices, Florence manages to start her business, which grows for about a year, after which sales slump.

She is opposed by the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart, who wants to acquire the Old House to set up an arts center.

Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of parliament, sponsors a bill that empowers local councils to buy any historic building that has been left uninhabited for five years. The bill is passed, the Old House is compulsorily purchased, and Florence is evicted.

Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975 at the age of 58, with "scholarly, accessible biographies" of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and two years later of The Knox Brothers, her father and uncles, although she never mentions herself by name.

Later in 1977 she published her first novel, 'The Golden Child', a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun mania of the 1970s, written to amuse her terminally ill husband, who died in 1976. Over the next five years she published four novels, each tied to her own experiences.

In 2008 'The Times' listed Penelope Fitzgerald among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, 'The Blue Flower', among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and inventio