Penelope Fitzgerald

A British radio station struggles through the London blitz, in a “wonderful” novel of World War II England (A.S. Byatt), by a veteran of the BBC.
 
The nation is listening. It’s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it’s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs...

The pettiness of an English seaside town. It is described by Florence Green, a middle-aged widow who buys a house for a bookshop, something the town has not had for over a century. Leading her enemies is Mrs. Gamart who wanted the house for an arts center.

"Some of the subjects considered in The Afterlife: Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Eliot, Mrs. Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, The Arts and Crafts Movement, The Poetry Bookshop, Edward Taylor, Charlotte Mew, Walter de la Mare, A.E. Housman, M.R. James, PUNCH, Ernest Shepard, William Butler, Yeats, Maud...

March 1913. Moscow is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. English painter Frank Reid returns from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she'll ever come back. All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children. Into Frank's life comes Lisa Ivanovna, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the point of seeming simple....

Beautiful Chiara is the last of the Ridolfi, a Florentine family of long lineage and eccentric habits. She is smitten with Salvatore, a brilliant but penniless doctor, a rational man who wants nothing to do with romance. This is the story of how these two - with the best intentions, the kindest of instincts, and the most meddlesome of friends - make each other wonderfully miserable.