'The Lost Bookshop' is a book for book lovers

“Lost is not a hopeless place to be. It is a place of patience, of waiting. Lost does not mean gone forever. Lost is a bridge between worlds, where the pain of our past can be transformed into power.”

— “The Lost Bookshop”

by Evie Woods

Some of the bestselling books on the market right now are the nice, cozy reads that book lovers seek to find. Let’s face it, there is so much going on in our world right now, and sometimes the best remedy is to sit down with a book that doesn’t trigger those stressors in our lives.

“The Lost Bookshop” is one of those books that references classic and contemporary literature in one of the most imaginative ways.

“The Lost Bookshop” is a magical realism novel about three people. Two of whom live in contemporary Dublin, and one in London, Paris and Dublin between 1921 and 1952 — connected by a bookshop that has a life of its own.

The story begins in the 1920s with Opaline Carlisle, an upper middle class 18-year-old woman who is being forced by her much older brother to marry one of his friends. She runs away to Paris where she ends up becoming an apprentice for Shakespeare and Company, working directly for Sylvia Beach. After a while, her brother finds her and she’s forced to flee again from Paris to Ireland, where she becomes an owner of a bookshop in Dublin.

The book moves to contemporary times where we have Martha Winter, an abused wife who left her husband and is terrified that she will be found. She found work as a housekeeper for an elderly, wealthy and mysterious woman named Madame Bowden. She befriends Henry Field, an academic from London who is searching for Emily Brontë’s missing manuscript and the mysterious lost bookshop. He meets Martha while on his search for the bookshop, which was located right next door to the house that Martha is working at. Henry and Martha end up joining forces to find the lost bookshop.

Woods touches on Anglo-Irish politics through England’s colonial history with Ireland and the impact it had on Ireland’s literary heritage. She highlights this through the changing timeline in Opaline’s chapters, where literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and James Joyce came and went over the years, sometimes appearing physically in Opaline’s bookshop, or through references in letters between friends. The book also takes on themes of women’s disenfranchisement in the 1920s, when women were wrongly institutionalized on the whim of a male relative.

Overall, “The Lost Bookshop” is a hard book to put down and is a book for book lovers. The author captures individual passions for literature, the joy of reading and how books illuminate the imagination through incredible storytelling.

“‘The thing about books,’ she said, ‘is that they help you imagine a life even bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’” — “The Lost Bookshop”

Deborah Condit is the owner of Books on the Bosque, 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2 or at booksonthebosque.com.