A family woman with a friend dying from lack of medical attention realizes, after being cornered by three men one night, how she can earn the money to help her friend and herself.

Beryl Bainbridge, Clive Barker, Terence Davies, and J. G. Farrell represent only a handful of the fascinating and provocative writers who have emerged from the Liverpool literary scene in the past seventy-five years. Published in commemoration of Liverpool’s 800th birthday in 2007 and in celebration of its status as a European City of Culture in 2008, Writing Liverpool presents a selection of essays and interviews with the filmmakers, journalists, cultural critics, and novelists who have called the city home—asking if there is a distinctive Liverpool voice, and if so, how we identify it.

Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975 at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades she published three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of short stories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in one volume. The Bookshop is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set in an isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens a bookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, and hostile townsfolk. The Gate of Angels is an Edwardian romance within a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and to his all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disrupted by a nurse named Daisy. The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical drama through the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romantic poet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair with a simple child-woman. These three novels all display Fitzgerald’s characteristic wit, intellectual breadth, and narrative brilliance, applied to an array of traditional forms into which she breathed new life.