The Lost Bookshop

This was a fun novel I picked up at Costco. These days, I’m kind of a sucker for the “magic book” genre (see Cloud Cuckoo Land or The Midnight Library).

It’s set in Ireland, and jumps around in time between two periods and three characters.

• Opaline is a woman on the run from her maniacal brother but dreams of being a rare bookseller in the 1800s.
• Martha is on the run from an abusive husband in the present day.
• Henry is a researcher trying to find a missing Emily Bronte manuscript in the present day

Martha and Henry meet each other, so their stories intertwine.

The chapters are first-person and alternate between the characters. This sometimes gets tricky with Martha and Henry, because you see things from one perspective, then might immediately see the same thing from the other perspective, and you have to remember who is speaking.

All throughout, there may or may not be a magic bookshop that appears and disappears on a sleepy lane in Dublin.

The story is quite entertaining, but I admit to being a little confused at the ending, specifically the disposition and reasons for the bookshop ending up the way it did.

But another part of me doesn’t really care. It was light reading and a fun story, even if I didn’t quite get the logic of it.

Book Info