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Jessica Francis Kane's new novel, Fonseca , fictionalizes an event in the life of British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. It follows the future literary legend as she and her 6-year-old son travel to a small town in Mexico in 1952, hoping to claim an unexpected inheritance.

'The Beginning of Spring' by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

I've been steeped in everything by and about Fitzgerald for the better part of a decade, and this is my favorite of her novels. A city (Moscow), a landscape (winter giving way to spring), and a vanished time (pre-revolutionary Russia ) are all mastered in less than 200 pages. The English printer Frank Reid—confused husb

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