The novel, set mainly in 1959, follows Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk (a thinly-disguised version of Southwold).

Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of parliament, sponsors a bill that empowers local councils to buy any historic building that has been left uninhabited for five years.

[9] Writing for The Guardian in 2023, Anthony Cummins noted that the book's early patronising reviews "missed Fitzgerald’s precise gift for dramatising complex moral questions in the most quaintly innocuous of settings."

He considered the book to mark the first full expression of the author's perfectly poised satirical voice; a memorable tragicomedy of stifling small-town English cruelties.

[10] In 2017 the novel was adapted by Isabel Coixet into a film of the same name, with Emily Mortimer as Florence Green, Patricia Clarkson as Violet Gamart, and Bill Nighy as Edmund Brundish.