If I’d been standing in a book store and read the first page of The Book Shop by Penelope Fitzgerald, I very well might have put it back on the shelf. It’s such an unpromising beginning…that image of the heron flying across an estuary with a struggling eel half-way down its gullet, the wispy, wiry, insignificant Florence Green, that British writing...subtle, understated, spare.

And 1959… was anything happening in 1959?  Not much. Elvis was still in the army, Annette Funicello was singing Tall Paul, Fidel Castro was just coming to power, Ben Hur was the movie to see, Mary Ann Mobley was Miss America, the Russians had beat us to the moon, and we were humming Nel Blu DiPinto Di Blu.

But I was not in a book store when I read the first page of The Book Shop. A friend whose taste I trust had passed the book to me. So I stuck with Fitzgerald. And by page seven, I was hooked.

The Book Shop is about a woman in late mid-life who takes a risk. There’s nothing even remotely special about her, but that’s exactly why I’ll probably remember her for a very long time. Having lived the most ordinary of lives, she wants to accomplish something of her own making, something that will matter, something that to her, and to those less than ordinary people around her, is quite extraordinary. She opens a book shop.

This effort to quicken a life causes a tiny, but determined shift in the small gray seaside town of Hardborough and among its small gray inhabitants. There are those who will not tolerate such effort, and those who haven’t the character to protect it. And then there is fate, which falls as often against us as for us.

This is a small marvelous book. Its focus on the most mundane of lives calls up the experience of all humanity.