It recently occurred to me that there seems to be a growing trend to feature bookstores in novels. I recently read two similar titles, “The Stationery Shop,” by Marjan Kamali, and “The Lost Bookshop,” by Evie Woods, which are about bookstores (well, technically the stationery shop is a stationery shop with books, but books play a large part in the lives of the young star-crossed lovers in Tehran, Iran). The Lost Bookshop overlaps with Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel, in that they both feature Shakespeare and Company, the iconic English language bookstore in Paris, founded by Sylvia Beach. A few months ago I read “The British Booksellers,” by Kristy Cambron, about two rival bookstores in WWII England.
I realized that three of the books that our LICL book group read this past year take place in bookstores: “The Education of Harriet Hatfield,” by May Sarton, is about a bookseller, Harriet, who runs a women’s bookstore in Cambridge. “How to Read a Book,” by Monica Wood, takes place partly in a bookstore that is much like our beloved Longfellow Books in Portland. The main character in “The Sentence,” by Louise Erdrich, Tookie, works in an indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis, which is based on Erdrich’s own bookstore, Birchbark Books (and, in fact, Louise is a minor character in the book).
“The Bookshop,” by Penelope Fitzgerald, is a classic (originally published in 1978) in the genre. Perusing titles in Minerva, the statewide book catalog for libraries, brings up fun titles such as “Murder in an Irish Bookshop,” “The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams,” and “How to Find Love in a Bookshop.”
These site bring more suggestions for novels to read that take place in a bookstore:
And for those of you into semantics, I had to look up the difference between bookstore and bookshop – in British English, bookshop is more commonly used. And the correct spelling for bookstore is one word, not two (I tend to interchange them, so good to know!)
What are some of your favorite novels that take place in bookstores?
