Penelope Fitzgerald

Young Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in 1912 Cambridge, falls in love with the dangerously mysterious Daisy, whom he awakens next to one morning after a freak accident

The Gate of Angels

Beautiful reissue of this wonderful Fitzgerald backlist title, shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize. In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot ("though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated"). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the universal problem known in Cambridge at the time as 'the absurdity of the Mind-Body Relationship'. To Fred this is tormenting rather than absurd. The young woman beside him when he wakes up one evening in the Wrayburns' spare bedroom might help resolve it, but how can he tell if she is quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything, and indeed he thinks it is. But scientists make mistakes. The Gate of Angels is a funny, touching and inspiring look at male-female relationships and the problems caused by thinking just a little too much

The Gate of Angels

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