Was given a proof copy of this fantastic new book by first time writer Alice Slater. Its a tale of two retailers, both booksellers but both very, very different people. Given the amount of deatil in regard to book selling and the life of retailers and their relationship with their product and the people who buy it, I could not help but imagine that she must have at some point worked in bookselling. The book is so laden with an eye for the day to day details and the way book shops are run, she has just got to have spent some time in the trenches of retailing. she carries the scars all right.
And while it may be set in a microcosm of the real world, in the bubble of book selling, it also works as a nicely observed thriller with a growing sense of unease as we get to better understand the foibles of the protagonists. After all, these characters are not aware they protagonists in any bodies story but their own. Hardly the stuff of Thomas Harris nightmare visions of the depravity the human soul , but it offers an unsettling glimpse into a very real world where no one is entirely bad nor entirely good. None of us live inside a thriller narrative while no one gets to spend their time in a situation comedy. We are just serving life terms in life stories of our own making.
i did feel the book felt very london centric, which is not to rift on its location. how much book selling in London would differ from bookselling in another English city is beyond me. i meant that it feels as though the store itself would not feel out of place in a Richard Curtis script. How that defines its authenticity is anyone's guess. How real is the paper world of such a notion, its subjective I suppose, based more on the notion of how real you want it to be. In anyones story we are in the mind space of another human being anyway. It only has to feel as real as the story requires it to feel. And on that level it does feel completely real. As I grow older I wonder if the past can best be defined as a place as opposed to a mind space, maybe both. The only palete we have to draw upon are our own memories, the only canvas the here and now.
On that leve, alone, I really enjoyed this fast moving and well observed book.
