and Lambiase, in a narrative that is sometimes sentimental, sometimes funny, sometimes true to life and always entertaining.Ī likable literary love story about selling books and finding love.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Zevin writes characters who grow and prosper, mainly A.J. All fit the milieu perfectly in a plot that spins out as expected, bookended by tragedy. Among others, there are the bright and sweet-natured Maya, who morphs into an insecure but still precocious teenager Lambiase, local police chief who finds in Firky the friend who expands his life A.J.’s brother-in-law, Daniel Parish, a once–best-selling author riding out a descending career arc and Daniel’s wife, Ismay, who sees A.J. doesn’t like e-readers-Zevin writes characters of a type, certainly, but ones who nonetheless inspire empathy. With a wry appreciation for the travails of bookstore owners-A.J. Add Amelia Loman, quirky traveling sales representative for Knightley Press, and a romance that takes four years to begin, and there’s a Nicholas Sparks quality to this novel about people who love books but can't find someone to love. That decision detours "his plan to drink himself to death" and reinvigorates his life and his bookstore. He adopts Maya, spurred by her immediate attachment to him.
Fikry cannot bear to leave the precocious child to the system once it becomes apparent her single mother has drowned herself in the sea. Then, within a span of days, his rare copy of Poe’s Tamerlane(worth $400,000) is stolen, and 2-year-old Maya is deposited at his bookstore.
He’s not yet 40 but already widowed, his wife, Nic, dead in an auto accident. Fikry, a man who holds no brief for random acts, who yearns for a distinct narrative, who flounders about until his life is reordered by happenstance.įikry owns Island Books on Alice Island, a summer destination off Massachusetts-think Nantucket. Zevin ( Margarettown,2006, etc.) chronicles the life of A.J.
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