‘Well up to the standard we have come to expect from this subtle, highly observant slightly feline — and yet essentially happy — novelist. As always unpredictable, with the author’s supposedly guileless voices coming easily off the page, it is as readable and wise as ever.’
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH, Financial Times
‘Fitzgerald is revelatory in her writing rather than argumentative: she is anti-intellectual in the sense of setting out primarily to entertain her readers. She produces richly comic operatic fictions in which characters, summed up in provocative single sentences, are defined by the irony of their situations and by the sympathetically absurd ways in which they cope with life.’
LINDA TAYLOR, Sunday Times
‘An attractive writer, with a fine sense of irony and an unostentatious sense of style. If Innocence is small scale, it contains some big scenes. They are beautifully handled and often very amusing too . . . As satisfying as it is entertaining.’
JOHN GROSS, New York Times Book Review
‘Innocence bustles along most agreeably. It’s warm with gossip, fluently organised, and unexpectantly knowledgeable about things Italian. Penelope Fitzgerald garners in English snobberies and absurdities with the same joyous appreciation that marks her account of the Italians’ hectic to-ings and fro-ings.’
VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM, Observer
‘Anyone who has lived in Florence (as I did) in the Fifties will marvel at the authenticity with which Mrs Fitzgerald brings that period of tentatively burgeoning hope and confidence to Life . . . The book contains some splendid set-pieces. In equal measure a work of moral, intellectual and emotional richness.’
FRANCIS KING, Spectator
‘Innocence is full of an eccentric, sly and generous humour — catching people in a phrase without pinning them down, presenting us with bizarre jokes and weird, wide-eyed characrters whose innocence is matched by their wiliness. While it is a novel that believes in happiness, a stricken sense of suffering threads the surreal vignettes and the delicious surprises — keeping happiness precious, painful and euphoric.’
NICCI GERRARD, Women’s Review
Also by the Author
EDWARD BURNE-JONES
THE KNOX BROTHERS
THE GOLDEN CHILD
THE BOOKSHOP
OFFSHORE
HUMAN VOICES
AT FREDDIE’S
CHARLOTTE MEW AND HER FRIENDS
INNOCENCE
THE BEGINNING OF SPRING
THE BLUE FLOWER
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.4thestate.co.uk
This Fourth Estate edition published 2013
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 1986
Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 2004
Copyright © Penelope Fitzgerald 1986
Introduction © Julian Barnes 2013
Preface © Hermione Lee 2013
Series advisory editor: Hermione Lee
Penelope Fitzgerald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual person’s living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780006542377
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007555659
Version: 2013-10-15
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
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