The Bookshop (film)

The Bookshop is a Spanish, British and German coproduced drama film. Directed and written by the Spanish director Isabel Coixet, based on the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, the film stars Emily Mortimer as Florence Green, Patricia Clarkson as Violet Gamart, and (Bill Nighy ) as Edmund Brundish. This is the third collaboration between Patricia Clarkson and Isabel Coixet, after Elegy and Learning to Drive.

The film was shot in Portaferry, County Down, Northern Ireland, and in Barcelona, Spain during August and September, 2016.

The film, as the novel does, is set mainly in 1959, and centres around Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk. The location chosen is the Old House, an abandoned, damp house said to be infested by ghosts. After many sacrifices, Florence manages to start her business, which grows for about a year after which sales slump. Mr. Brundish, the lonely and mysterious inhabitant of the house at the top of the hill, is Florence's best client. The influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart, wants and intends to set up an arts centre in the Old House. Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of Parliament, sponsors a bill that empowers local councils to buy any historical building that has been left uninhabited for five years. The bill is passed, the Old House is compulsorily purchased, and Florence is evicted.