The Lost Bookshop
Evie Woods, 2023
Fantasy Historical fictionContemporary fiction
A vanished bookshop, a hidden manuscript and three lives tangled in the stories we inherit—a warm, bookish mystery for anyone who believes books can save us. A warm, bookish mystery with lyrical prose, a hopeful mood and a quiet pull of curiosity.
Feels like hope, wonder and curiosity. About art, identity and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy books about books, intertwined lives and gentle mystery touched with wonder. The three storylines and shifting timelines can ask you to keep track carefully.
Why read it
It offers a hopeful, artful escape for anyone who believes stories can steady us, and its bookish mystery gives you something to follow with pleasure.
A page from the book
The books on your shelf are proof that something survives.
I couldn’t explain it, not even to myself, but books gave me an unflinching sense of stability and groundedness. That because words survived, somehow I would too. Evie Woods.Evie Woods is the pen name of Irish novelist Evie Gaughan; The Lost Bookshop became a word-of-mouth bestseller after its 2023 release.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is The Lost Bookshop for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy books about books, intertwined lives and gentle mystery touched with wonder. The three storylines and shifting timelines can ask you to keep track carefully.
- What is The Lost Bookshop like?
- A warm, bookish mystery with lyrical prose, a hopeful mood and a quiet pull of curiosity. Feels like hope, wonder and curiosity. About art, identity and freedom.
- What should I read after The Lost Bookshop?
- If you liked The Lost Bookshop, try Tress of the Emerald Sea (Brandon Sanderson), Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) and Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel).
A taste of the feed
How much of your character is just a container you were poured into?
We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours. Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit.
Tress of the Emerald Sea · Brandon Sanderson
What we lose when a book goes out of the world.
Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
Cloud Cuckoo Land · Anthony Doerr
A man buys supplies for a disaster and grieves the ordinary world mid-aisle.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
Station Eleven · Emily St. John Mandel
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed