‘… It’s time you took your head out of your books and faced reality.’
I clung tighter to my book. A rare first American edition of Wuthering Heights, a gift from my father, along with a deep love of reading. … It was not in perfect condition; the cloth boards were worn on the edges and the back one had a v-shape nicked out of it. The pages were coming loose, as the threads that sewed them together were fraying with age and use. But to me, all of these features, including the cigar-smoke smell of the paper, were like a time machine. Perhaps the seeds were sown then.

Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop (One More Chapter, 2024), p. 4.

In summer I visited my sister at her and her husband’s house and noticed a book with leaves and gold foil on its cover under a pile of baby stuff. It caught my eye partially because of the way the light shone on the foil (because I’m a bit of a magpie in that way), and also because it looked exactly like a book I’d been seeing around everywhere and had wanted to read. I hadn’t seen my sister in a while at that point and she was a very tired new mother so I did the polite thing and kept quiet, really hoped it was a belated birthday present, and talked about life with her. A few hours later, she told me she had bought me The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods, which was the book in the kitchen with the pretty cover just perceptible through baby items. The lesson here is that patience is a virtue.

The Lost Bookshop is a magical realism romance novel about three people—two in contemporary Dublin and one in London, Paris and Dublin between 1921 and 1952—connected by a bookshop that seemingly has a life of its own. Opaline Carlisle is an upper-middle class eighteen year old bookworm in England in 1921 when the novel begins and after her much older brother decides it’s time for her to marry, she runs away to Ireland, determined to do something other than belong to a man she does not know. (Spoiler but really not really: she becomes a bookseller, or “book dealer” as they said back in the day.) In the modern day, Martha Winter is a young Irish woman who has very recently escaped an abusive marriage and has settled down in a supposedly unremarkable house on a street in Dublin to start a new life as a housekeeper for the enigmatic Madame Bowden. At the same time that Martha is beginning this new life, Henry Field, an English PhD student engaged to a woman who is at best apathetic towards him, is in Dublin looking for what he believes is a lost Brontë manuscript and also looking to find out more about the owner of a very old bookshop. 

My favourite thing about this novel was how unapologetically fangirlish about books and literary works it is. Within the first chapter, I understood why it had been described as a book for book lovers by so many people. Thanks to the multiple time periods it’s set in, which I loved, The Lost Bookshop is crammed with explicit and less obvious references to both classic and contemporary literature in the best way imaginable. I don’t tend to read a lot of contemporary fiction, or see it referenced much in the books I read so it was jarring at first to read about Opaline’s love of Wuthering Heights in one chapter, and then read about Martha picking up Normal People in another. What I loved even more than just these references or allusions to popular literature was how Woods used them to add texture to her narrators’ lives and to also hold a mirror to their lives. There are some similarities between Sally Rooney’s Marianne Sheridan and the character of Martha that will be obvious to anybody who’s read Normal People, just as there are some also quite obvious parallels between Opaline’s life and the stories of some of the Jane Austen novels the book makes mention of. The intertextuality of The Lost Bookshop reminded me of the way Maggie O’Farrell used animals to comment on Lucrezia’s internal life in The Marriage Portrait and like a typical former literature student I found the ‘task’ of deciphering whether there were any other points about our characters’ lives being made through these intertextual references very fun.

Henry and Opaline represent an elite of society with ample access to the world of the literary arts while Martha represents the people for whom “serious” literature feels inaccessible and too “intellectual” a pursuit. I really enjoyed how Woods explored this felt polarity because there was no denial of the fact that a certain level of privilege and comfort is often required for a career in the arts, and to an extent, even an interest in them to the point of academic study. Opaline comes from money and it isn’t implied to be new (her name’s Opaline, for crying out loud) and while Henry is a poor PhD student, he has enough money to be able to traipse through Dublin searching for a lost Brontë manuscript without any mention of a job to support this endeavour. Alongside this, Woods also highlighted that it is a lack of opportunity and not a lack of brightness that keeps certain people from things like engagement with literature or the study of other arts. When Martha decides to pursue a degree in Irish Literature in spite of her imposter syndrome, her analyses of the texts she reads on her course shows her capability for textual analysis and all the things I’ve had people marvel at me for when they learn I chose to study literature, as though there is anything particularly remarkable or genius in itself about being able to say something about something you’ve read. 

I absolutely adored that Woods depicted Martha’s gradual regaining of her confidence following an abusive marriage as related to her continual articulation of her thoughts on the literature she was reading on her course through her discussions with Henry or in her seminars because I thought it represented the relationship between the ability to speak and own one’s own opinions and enfranchisement and selfhood amazingly. In the story of ‘Terues, Procne and Philomela’ found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when Philomela is raped and her tongue cut out by her brother-in-law Tereus, she is left unable to speak about what he has done to her. Remembering that she is an exceptional seamstress, she weaves his crimes onto fabric which she then sends to her sister by way of a bird. Through her skill at weaving, she is able to articulate non-verbally what Tereus has prevented her from doing in her body, and it is through this act of ‘speaking’ that she is saved. This story may not have immediately been on Woods’ mind in Martha’s instance but later on in the novel—this time in Opaline’s life— Woods describes something so like Philomela’s story that it’s very difficult to believe she was not aware of the myth when writing her book. 

The Lost Bookshop is a story about literature set largely in Dublin and narrates two English characters’ experiences as immigrants in Ireland. Naturally, Woods touches on Anglo-Irish politics through England’s colonial history with Ireland and the impact of this on Ireland’s literary heritage, which she does mainly through the conversations between Martha and Henry. Another way she did this (and really well, I thought) was through the changing timeline in Opaline’s chapters, in which 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 to emerging, as yet unknown writers on the literary landscape of Opaline’s time.

The book also tackles themes of women’s disenfranchisement through Opaline’s experiences as an upper class woman in the first few decades of the twentieth century when marital rape was not considered possible let alone recognised as a crime, and where a woman could be wrongly institutionalised on the whim of a male relative. While I didn’t find the three main characters particularly compelling on their own, when their lives started intersecting The Lost Bookshop became very hard to put down. It’s definitely a book for book lovers, but it’s especially a book for those book lovers for whom just reading the words on the page aren’t enough. How Woods wrote about books and her characters’ individual passions for literature and reading took me back to my pre-teen years where the joy of reading was in the realisation that behind this thing you loved so much was a mind as imaginative and vibrant as yours, as much as it was in the story itself.

I’d define The Lost Bookshop as a cosy historical fiction magical realism mystery romance book. A mouthful, yes, and it’s one I’d recommend to everyone into reading about other people’s love of reading, cosy settings, academia and authorship, and blueberry muffins and steaming cups of coffee. (The last two in this last have nothing to do with the book – reading it just makes you crave the feeling of being in a cafe with a muffin or cake and a warming drink.) Like Opaline’s bookshop, The Lost Bookshop is fun and quaint, unpretentious and inviting, and lastly, quite moving. 4.5/5 

A Moment for The Dress…*

*some of my favourite lines from the book

A book is never what it seems. I think my father had hoped my love of books would instil an interest in my schooling, but if anything, it only fuelled my loathing for the classroom. I tended to live in my imagination and so, every evening, I would race home from school and ask him to read to me. He was a civil servant, an honest man with a passion for learning. He always said that books were more than words on paper; they were portals to other places, other lives. I fell in love with books and the vast worlds they held, and I owed it all to my father .

pp. 4-5

Reading the book, that’s only the beginning – I want to know everything about it. What I want to know is who wrote it, when and where and how and why. Who printed it, what it cost, how it survived, where it’s been since, when it was sold, why and by whom, how it got here… there’s no limit to what I want to know about a book.

p. 94

‘Perhaps I can stay a little longer,’ I said, kneeling on the bed beside him and letting him unbutton my blouse again. Loneliness is not a discerning bedfellow. In fact, the more inappropriate the company, the more it suited my fatalistic outlook when it came to love. Something told me I would never find it, so why bother saving myself for it?

p. 187

People imagine that the worst thing about incarceration is the thought of being locked inside, but there is another trauma to endure. Whilst some of the women were simply anxious or depressed, I was now living with women suffering all types of physical and mental disability and not only that, was considered to be one of them. That has a profound impact on one’s sense of self; of what is true.

p. 295

*What resonated with me here was Opaline’s observation of the capacity of other peoples’ perceptions of you to impact not only your self-perception, but your understanding of reality as well.

I recalled something Lucinda had said to me before I left; that it didn’t matter whether the decision you made was right or wrong, as long as you made it. That’s what moved you along in life. In fact she had used the word ‘journey’ because she was still in her earth mother phase.

p. 300

Reliance is something that happens without you noticing it.

p. 354

I had fooled myself into thinking that if I didn’t get close to him, I wouldn’t miss him if he left. Stupid, stupid woman. Intimacy is only one string on the bow. The instrument still plays the music.

p. 356

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

p. 406