The Means of Escape: The Stories of Penelope Fitzgerald

‘Penelope Fitzgerald writes discreet, brief, perfect tales... Jane Austen’s nearest heir.’
A.S. BYATT

‘There are twenty perfectly competent novelists at work in Britain today, but only a handful producing what one could plausibly call works of literature. Of this handful, Penelope Fitzgerald possesses what one can call the purest imagination.’
Evening Standard

A collection of short stories from ‘one of the finest and most entertaining novelists writing in England today’ (Observer)

Penelope Fitzgerald is, now more than ever, one of the most highly-regarded writers on the English literary scene. Apart from Iris Murdoch no other writer has been shortlisted for the Booker more often than Penelope Fitzgerald.

PF’s last novel, The Blue Flower, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim in Britain, America and Europe.

These stories have all been published before, but in newspapers, journals and British Council-sponsored volumes of new writing.
So – even the most dedicated Fitzgerald fans are unlikely to have come across them. This is the first time they will have been collected together in volume form.

From the tale of a young boy in seventeenth-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide-ranging, enigmatic and very funny. They are each miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behaviour, seen simultaneously with Fitzgerald’s generous, but unwavering moral gaze.

This collection is an absolute treat. You will never read a better collection. Fitzgerald’s ability to capture an entire world in a story of only eight pages is unsurpassable.