The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods is a story about a mysterious bookshop in Dublin and the people involved with it. Martha has recently left her husband and is looking to start over when she lands a job as a live-in maid and housekeeper for an older lady in Dublin. It is there that she meets Henry, a young man who is a rare book expert and looking for an old bookshop in Dublin that might have connections to the book he is searching for. A bookshop that has the neighboring address to the house Martha is working in. However, the building and address for the bookshop has disappeared leaving the two of them searching for answers about the bookshop and its mysterious owner. Opaline is a young woman looking to have a life of her own that is uncontrolled by her older brother and parents so she leaves London and escapes to Paris in the 1930’s. As she works on finding her own path in life she ends up falling into the life of a bookseller and rare book expert as she travels from Paris to Dublin to open her own bookshop.
This book was pretty interesting as it dealt with three different narrators and two different timelines which made for some pretty odd elements in the story. It was a great read but the narrative style definitely added some mystery elements to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Martha, Henry and Opaline as each made their own internal journeys as they worked on discovering what was important in their own lives but it was also interesting to see how their lives overlapped and intersected. This book was fascinating as it had a great plot based around the mysterious lost bookshop and the dual timeline really added to that as the timeline in the present revealed things about the timeline in the past earlier than that timeline did and yet the past timeline had some pretty unexpected twists and turns that were not revealed in the present timeline till the same time in the book. The multiple layers created by that was pretty well done and it was really well balanced to create just the right amount of mystery and intrigue for each character and storyline. The balance between revealing things and not revealing things was pretty fine at times but thoroughly enjoyable to read. I really liked the characters as well as they seemed very well developed and rather relatable actually. They are definitely the type of people I could see actually hanging around an old bookshop discussing old books, I would probably join their conversation. There were a few spots where I found it mildly difficult to read but that was only because of the things that happen to the characters. Opaline has a lot of difficult and bad things happen to her as a result of being an independent woman in her time and Martha escaped an abusive marriage so it dealt with some difficult topics at times. Even Henry’s past had some problematic issues. In many ways these actually added to the character development for them and are common problems for their respective time periods though. The book was pretty good and I am happy giving it four out of five stars.
This was a pretty good stand-alone fantasy novel with some minor elements of historical fiction so if that holds your interest then you might consider trying it. As I have mentioned there are several potentially problematic issues present in the book so I am sticking with the recommended age range of adult readers. At best I would suggest no one younger than about sixteen should probably read this. It was pretty good and I was enthralled while reading it so I hope you will consider it. Remember to share your thoughts in the comments if you do.