Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy star in Isabel Coixet's big screen adaptation of the novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. In 1959, widow Florence Green Mortimer uproots her simple life in favour of a new challenge in the English seaside town of Hardborough. Buying an old house in the middle of the town, she converts the ground floor into a bookshop in the hope of bringing people together through the joy of literature. Her good intentions and ambition come under fire however, when she stocks the scandalous novel 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov and the influencial Violet Gamart Patricia Clarkson vows to do all in her power to get the bookshop closed down.