Encountering ‘The Bookshop Novel’

In the summer of 2018 I bought a copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop whilst on holiday in Aldborough, on the east coast of England. It was exceptional weather, with huge skies, endless shingle beaches, and great places to swim. The Bookshop, set in this very same landscape in the year 1959, was excellent holiday reading, despite the underlying bitterness of the story. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 40 years before I encountered it, the novel reveals how a middle-aged widow Florence Green takes on a derelict property in the eponymous town of Hardborough, and sets about making a home and opening a bookshop. Her project is a symbol of independence and determination. Unfortunately, she needs both of these in large amounts to deal in turns with the town’s sceptical banker; a machinating local worthy who plots against her; and the moral outrage of local people offended by the books she sells. Despite finding a wealthy friend who champions her cause, she is broken down by petty jealousy, disapproval and vindictive scheming. Eventually Florence is driven out of her property on a legal technicality. She leaves the town, and in the film of the novel, looks back to see the bookshop, along with her dreams and aspirations, going up in flames.

A couple of years later, on a holiday in France I read Antoine Laurain’s The Red Notebook. Here the central character is a Parisian bookseller who finds a bag in the street containing a woman’s daybook, full of cryptic observations about her life and the people she encounters. He sets out to find her. The resulting quest is bestrewn with literary references, accounts of a typical day in the bookshop, author events, and book signings. In this splendid novel, the day to day life of the bookshop is the detailed backdrop to a romantic and intelligent mystery story. Appropriately, it is an author at a book launch who provides the connection that finally brings the bookseller and the woman together. I am now a huge admirer of Antoine Laurain’s novels, and would put this in his top three.

Last year I stumbled on The Bookshop of Second Chances, by Jackie Fraser. Again there was a connection with place. The bookshop in question turned out to be located in my home region of Dumfries and Galloway. So I was drawn to this one by the setting and in particular the fictitious town of Baldochrie, a thinly disguised Wigtown, famous for its literary festival and numerous bookshops. The ‘second chance’ comes when Thea Mottram, recently made redundant and newly separated from her husband, inherits a property from a distant uncle and quits the south of England to live in rural Scotland. Taking a job in a bookshop, Thea quickly falls in love with its crotchety owner. Thereafter, the story contains a series of surprises and jeopardy moments, as it envelops you in a comforting Sunday night of undemanding reading.

From these contrasting and unrelated works, I began to realise that the bookshop novel might be seen as a genre in its own right, containing further types within it: literary, popular, cosy, romantic – each united around the business of selling and buying books. It didn’t take me long to put together and read a collection of a dozen bookshop novels. I soon came across several more and keep spotting new ones on a regular basis. The title of the latest one to cross my path, by Dumfries-connected Jackie Baldwin, breaks new ground for the genre: Murder at the Wild Haggis Bookshop.

There is probably an interesting PhD project in all this for someone. What follows here however is not a systematic study of this type of fiction, but rather my thoughts around some linked questions: why do bookshops capture the imagination, become cherished places in our communities, and even find their way onto the pages of novels? And all this despite the tidal wave of online purchasing, and much wider discussion about the decline of the high street. The bookshop novels I’ve read touch on these issues in various ways, creating there own distinct tropes.

For example, in fiction as in ‘real life’, the bookshop has to be somewhere. Not some anonymous street or out of town warehouse, but a recognisable place, whether real or invented. These bookshops have attractive hand-painted signs that stand out from their neighbours. They make the street more interesting, smarter even. Their window displays draw you in like iron filings to a magnet. They occupy ancient buildings and quirky corners. Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop, is set not only in that beautiful city, but actually on a restored barge moored in the Seine. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, takes place in an upscale town on an imaginary island off the coast of Massachusetts. Evie Woods’ The Lost Bookshop uses magic realism to expose and conceal a Dublin bookshop, where stories unfold and books ‘help you to build a life bigger and better than you can ever dream’. Scottish author Jenny Colgan has written no less than four romantically inspired examples – two set in Edinburgh’s old town and two in the Highlands. The locus is therefore central to the charm of the bookshop novel.

Turning from place to plot, I found that what might be termed the redemptive power of bookshops is a recurring theme in these books, usually expressed in some kind of recovery narrative. Quite common is the idea of establishing and running a bookshop as the owner’s way out of trauma, illness or breakdown. The Bookshop is the exemplar of this but its desperate ending is in sharp contrast to many of those that have followed it. Take for instance, Welcome to the Hynam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum and set in Seoul, here Yeongju takes refuge in her new bookshop venture. She has burnout from a high-powered job, made worse by a broken relationship. For many months she does far more reading than selling. Yet over time, other troubled people are drawn to Hynam-Dong and gradually a small community is formed there, where deeper meaning is found in the shelter of the bookshop, in the pleasure of reading, and in the search for collective wellbeing.

All three novels by Satoshi Yagiwasa in the Morisaki Bookshop series, explore this kind of territory. In the first book, a young woman, Takako, is devasted when her partner and work colleague announces he is getting married to someone else. She leaves her job and takes solace in working at her uncle’s second-hand bookshop in Tokyo. Here she discovers the healing power of reading, gets drawn into her uncle’s own personal struggles, and eventually they both reach better times. The shop is packed with books, but also with the personal stories of the customers and those who work there. Bookshops like this are of interest to novel writers partly because book-buying is not so much a transaction but more an interaction between seller and customer. Opinions are expressed, recommendations are made, mutual likes and dislikes surface – all in the acquisition of even a modestly-priced paperback.

There also appear to be various splinters and offshoots from the ‘classic’ bookshop novel I’m describing here. I’ve read two novels recently that refer within the storyline to the long-established – and real – bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., in Paris, though the shop isn’t central to the plot. There are also non-fiction works such as Asne Seirstad’s account of the struggles of The Bookseller of Kabul, Sultan Khan, who observes; ‘First the Communists burnt my books, then the Mujahedeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burnt them all over again’. More recently, Nadia Wassef in Chronicles of A Cairo Bookseller has written a personal, feminist, memoir about the Diwan bookshop and how she and her associates sought to develop it in order to widen access to books and literature across the whole of Egypt. Sitting across the boundary between fiction and personal reflection, are works like Sean Bythell’s quartet of wry, often grumpy and at times ascerbic accounts of a bookshop owner’s life, another work set in Wigtown – Scotland’s designated ‘book town’.

Bookshop owners have perhaps long understood what novelists are now discovering. Properly organised and run, the bookstore is replete with social capital. It is this wider social relevance that makes bookshops, particularly small independents, especially interesting at the social level. Moreover they seem to be bucking the trend of high street closures and proving they have resilience.

Independent booksellers have been described as ‘reluctant capitalists’. They must sell books in order to survive in their trade. They are also a passionate alternative to mass on-line book selling. Yet the rise of the bookshop novel as a form in its own right tells us they have become much more besides. The bookshop is now a ‘third place’ – sitting somewhere between the public sphere of work and employment and the private sphere of home and household (1). Our favourite bookshops provide coffee, comfy chairs, and conversation. They offer warm throws and blankets, maybe even a fireside to sit by, as we browse and immerse ourselves in a new or potential purchase. The bookshop has thus become a multi-facetted pleasure dome, enticing the reading public to enter.

Bookshops are of course long established intermediaries between authors and readers. In addition, they have now become sites of consumption in a much wider sense than the act of buying a book. They can be seen as community assets, places to meet, sanctuaries from loneliness, or a badly heated home. They provide entertainment in launch events, author talks, and participation in literary festivals. Independent booksellers may be reluctant capitalists, but they are also social entrepreneurs, promoting our wellbeing through reading and through association with others.

Against this background, the bookshop novel celebrates the varied and enchanting spaces now to be found in many of our towns and villages. If The Bookshop ended badly, many of its successors in the genre offer a more uplifting story, taking us through the torments and personal struggles of the owners and customers, to a welcome transformation set in the heart of a quirky book-lined ‘third space’.

So, here’s to the pleasure of bookshop novels, along with the delightful and welcoming settings they so appreciatively depict. Let’s hope they can survive, thrive, and continue to enrich our lives!

(1) Oldenburg, Ray (2023). The great good place: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community (2nd ed.). Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Berkshire Publishing Group LLC. ISBN 978-1-61472-097-3.

Bookshop Day happens in October each year in the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia