Emily Mortimer plays the quietly heroic shop owner at the heart of this fascinating Penelope Fitzgerald adaptationThe Spanish film-maker Isabel Coixet brings an interesting, unsentimental detachment to this odd tragicomedy of provincial life.
She refuses the familiar grace notes of comedy and sugary romance in favour of something more awkward and angular.
Coixet has herself adapted this from the semi-autobiographical novel by Penelope Fitzgerald about an amiable young widow who comes to a remote coastal Suffolk town in the late 1950s, buys a dilapidated property there and enterprisingly converts it into a bookshop.
She makes a success of it, largely by stocking Nabokov’s Lolita – thus incurring the envious displeasure of a local grande dame who had herself wanted the property for a self-aggrandising “arts centre”.Emily Mortimer plays Florence Green, the woman of quietly polite heroism at the story’s centre, Patricia Clarkson sports an expression of unfathomably queenly displeasure as her enemy,
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