Soon to be a major motion film, starring Bill Nighy, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson. In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop -- the only bookshop -- in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbours' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar steeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.