The Paris Bookseller

Readers and listeners alike will get lost in Maher’s (The Girl in White Gloves) story about a bookstore in Paris populated by the “lost generation” of English literature. The novel fleshes out the real Sylvia Beach and her seminal bookstore and lending library, Shakespeare and Company. All of the great authors of the 1920s met, talked, ate, drank, and read within its walls. In this wonderful bookstore, James Joyce’s Ulysses came into the world, and the magic created by Beach fostered a literary movement. Lauryn Allman brings this story right off the page. Her accents and character voicing keep conversations clear and precise, placing listeners right in the bookstore, following the lively exchanges between these marvelous characters. Her sense of timing keeps the story flowing in a natural rhythm, making it hard for readers to turn it off and go about their daily lives.