He says it's good (though he dies soon after), but Florence's troubles still grow only worse, both before and after Nabokov sells out. When Florence is tipped off by a slippery ex-BBC employee that she ought to stock Lolita, she questions only whether it's a ``good book''-and so she asks the town's one true aristocrat, the dour Edmund Brundish, veteran of WW I. Gamart, who now says she wanted Old House for an ``arts centre.'' And things, indeed, start going wrong for Florence-not from the real ghost, who seems frightening but harmless, but from inexplicable changes in statute, policy, and law. What Florence hasn't counted on, though, is the studied malevolence of Hardborough's social illuminary and civic leader, Mrs.
Raven, the marshman, says, Florence ``don't frighten,'' which is why he has her hold onto a horse's tongue while he files its teeth. And so she borrows money to buy her stock and, as a place to house both it and herself, the High Street building known as Old House, over half a millennium old and faultless except for being damp and haunted. It's 1959, and the ``small, wispy and wiry'' Florence Green, a widow and middle-aged, wants to open a bookshop in the little, bleak, remote, sea-swept East Anglian town of Hardborough. On the heels of The Blue Flower (1997), here's a slighter, equally charming, half as deep little novel-about snobbery and meanness in the provinces-that the immensely gifted Fitzgerald published in England in 1978.
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