""The Bookshop" catches Fitzgerald coming into top form" said Peter Wolfe in "Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald" (2004). Wolfe held the book to be a fully realized work of fiction that confirms the author's hold on actuality and the cogency of her satire. In an introduction to a 2010 reprint, Frank Kermode wrote that the novel had won Fitzgerald "the respectful attention of reviewers and the admiration of a larger public". Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald's biographer, considered the novel to be "a joyous exercise in precise, eloquent detail"; a novel that "uses its small-scale comic plot for a serious moral argument".