The Blue Flower

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Offshore and Innocence comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie.

The Blue Flower is set in the age of Goethe, in the small towns and great universities of late eighteenth-century Germany. It tells the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis. Fritz seeks his father’s permission to wed his “heart's heart,” his “spirit's guide” — a plain, simple child named Sophie von Kühn. It is an attachment that shocks his family and friends. Their brilliant young Fritz, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard? How can this be?

"A historical novel that's touching, funny, unflinchingly tragic, and at the same time uncompromising in its accuracy, learning and detail: a book that brings its subject entirely alive, almost nothing seeming beyond its grasp."  -  Kirkus Reviews

The irrationality of love, the transfiguration of the commonplace, the clarity of purpose that comes with knowing one’s own fate — these are the themes of this beguiling novel, themes treated with a mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humour unique to the art of Penelope Fitzgerald.