The Little Paris Bookshop

A Novel

No cover

Steve West, Cassandra Campbell, Emma Bering, Nina George: The Little Paris Bookshop (AudiobookFormat, 2015, Random House Audio, Random House Audio Publishing Group)

audio cd

Published June 23, 2015 by Random House Audio, Random House Audio Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-1-101-88981-7
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2 stars (1 review)

“There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only…A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.”

Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission …

8 editions

Disappointing

2 stars

I'd been looking forward to reading The Little Paris Bookshop, even going so far as to put off reading it so the novel wouldn't be gone too quickly. I had imagined from the title and the cover art that it would be similar in atmosphere to an Antoine Laurain story and, to be honest, what could I not like about a novel set in a Parisian bookshop? As it turns out, there's a lot I didn't like!

The Little Paris Bookshop is actually mostly set on a barge, called Lulu, which sails from Paris fairly early on in the story so I lost the romance of the city. Lulu has been turned into a bookshop whose emotionally-damaged owner, Jean, sails south in order to come to terms with his heartbreak over a woman who left him twenty-one years ago. 21! Jean only realises he needed to do something about his …