Florence Green, a free-spirited widow, puts grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop — the first such shop in the sleepy seaside town of Hardborough, England. But this mini social revolution soon brings her fierce enemies: she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and also crosses Mrs. Gamart, Harborough’s vengeful, embittered alpha female who is a wannabe doyenne of the local arts scene.