Shortlisted for the Booker Prize: A novel of two 'wonderful characters' who meet by accident in Edwardian England, and fall inconveniently in love (The Washington Post). In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger-fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications-not...

"Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets. It is Nenna's domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws...

When a free-spirited widow opens a bookshop in a conservative coastal town in England in 1959, she attracts both opposition and support from the local community.