The Bookshop (12A)

Set in a small town in 1959 England, it is the story of a woman who decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield.

Based on the 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, war widow Florence Green moves to a rambling, run-down property in fictional Hardborough, on the Suffolk coast, and, on a whim, decides that the town needs a bookshop. Her plans are met with enthusiasm in some quarters – quiet, elderly recluse Mr Brundish and spirited, working-class young Christine – but treacherously polite opposition from the majority. The radical new literature that she stocks, Nabokov’s  Lolita and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, is the stuff of subversiveness. A period film about British provincial life that is written and directed by maverick Catalan filmmaker Isabel Coixet, it’s brimming with ideas, not least the timely notion that a world without books is an unpleasant, narrow-minded place to be.

Cert: 12A

Running time: 113 mins