The Books Behind the Summer's Best Movies

In The Bookshop, out August 24, Emily Mortimer plays Florence, who dreams of opening a bookstore in a small British seaside town in 1959. Who'd have a problem with that? For starters, there's Violet (Patricia Clarkson), chief among the town blue bloods, who are averse to any cultural change—especially once Florence's stock of Lolita and Fahrenheit 451 starts flying off the shelves. The film plays up the era's culture wars: Vladimir Nabokov's novel appears in Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 source novel, but Ray Bradbury's doesn't. And the title and setting aside, Fitzgerald wasn't interested in writing about literature so much as power and clout, and her gemlike short novel exquisitely explores the subtle ways that small-town manners cloak a brand of nasty skulduggery that undermines well-intentioned women like Florence.