“The Lost Bookshop” - Evie Woods

 📚 TLB is the best kind of tale. It draws you in unquestioningly. You’re not distracted by timelines and Easter eggs; you’re simply immersed in the story the author chooses to tell. 

📚 TLB features 3 protagonists: Opaline (in 1921), and Martha and Henry (contemporary). All story lines are communicated in 1st person. Henry is more of a bit player here. Primarily, it’s Opaline and Martha’s story. Opaline flees a forced marriage to a stranger to find her own way in Dublin. Decades later, Martha, a DV victim, arrives in Dublin and takes a desperate job as housekeeper to an eccentric (to put it mildly) elderly former actress.

📚 The bookshop provides the magic, but I was drawn in by the gritty story lines of Opaline and Martha. The mystery of the bookshop itself, coupled with 2 exceedingly likeable heroines, and the historical details that fill in their time periods, renders TLB a perfect blend of fantasy and (sometimes harsh) reality.

📚 If you enjoyed TLB, you’ll loves these novels combining contemporary or historical fiction and magic!

“The Lost Apothecary” - Sarah Penner

“Hamnet” - Maggie O’Farrell

“The Fortunes of Jaded Women” - Carolyn Huynh

“Gold Diggers” - Sanjena Sathian

“Miss Benson’s Beetle” - Rachel Joyce