In his unfinished novel Heinrich von Oftterdingen, the flower is something unattainable and unreachable. Award-winning illustrator James Albon, working with reductive lino cuts, provides images that reflect the shifting nature of Fritz himself: energetic and melancholy, light and dark. The Blue Flower: A Novel Kindle Edition by Penelope Fitzgerald (Author), Candia McWilliam (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition 667 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 12.49 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER in Fiction. Fitzgerald took the idea of the blue flower direct from Novalis. In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his fathers. Reading The Blue Flower is an ethereal and addictive experience, sure to be just the beginning of a literary journey with an underrated yet exceptional writer. In his introduction to this edition, Neel Mukherjee describes Fitzgerald’s books as ‘slim, fleet-footed, at once weightless, like air, and immense with the worlds they contain’. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel is a modern masterpiece, a feat of immersion and sleight of hand it is effortlessly light, reducing the great distance of history to little more than the turn of a page, whilst containing unexpected depths of poetry at its heart. His family, alternately bemused and charmed, do their best to both hinder and aid this ultimately tragic betrothal. Now shes back with her tenth and best book so far, The Blue Flower. Since then, shes written eight more, three of which have been short-listed for Englands prestigious Booker Prize, and one of which, Offshore, won. Brilliant and idealistic, his heart is captured by the young Sophie von Kuhn, an artless child he nonetheless describes as his ‘true Philosophy’. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her first novel 20 years ago, at the age of 59. The Blue Flower tells of the early life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the young man who would become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis.

The blue flower fitzgerald