The Means Of Escape

With the death of Penelope Fitzgerald this year, the literary world lost one of its finest, most original, and most beloved authors. Fitzgerald began her writing career at age sixty and wrote eight remarkable novels in rapid succession over the next twenty years. Completed just before her death, THE MEANS OF ESCAPE is Fitzgerald's first new book since the best-selling THE BLUE FLOWER. Never before have her short stories been collected in book form, and none of them has ever appeared in the United States.
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE showcases this incomparable author at her most intelligent, her funniest, her best. Like her novels, these brilliant stories are miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior. Concise, comic, biting, and mischievous, they are vintage Fitzgerald. Roaming the globe and the ages, the stories travel from England to France to New Zealand and from today to the seventeenth century. Uniting them is a universal theme: the shifting balance between those who are in positions of power—by wealth, status, or class—and those who, deceptively, are not. THE MEANS OF ESCAPE memorializes a life and a writer guided by a generous but unwavering moral gaze.

"Penelope Fitzgerald is the finest British writer alive."

The Los Angeles Times

“Warm and wry, her writing is as economical as it is perfect. It’s always a pleasure to see a new book under her name.”

The Washington Post

"She is, isn't she, the best." -- A.S. Byatt

“Reading [Fitzgerald’s Tction] is like having someone play Mozart two rooms away: light, sweet — jolly, even — and utterly piercing, like a needle though the heart.”

The New Yorker

“Fitzgerald is the funniest writer in English now alive.”

New Republic