The bookseller's secret : a novel / Michelle Gable.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"The Bookseller's Secret is a delight from start to finish, a literary feast any booklover will savor!" --Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye



ARISTOCRAT, AUTHOR, BOOKSELLER, SPY--A THRILLING NOVEL ABOUT REAL-LIFE LITERARY ICON NANCY MITFORD FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF A PARIS APARTMENT



In 1942, London, Nancy Mitford is worried about more than air raids and German spies. Still recovering from a devastating loss, the once sparkling Bright Young Thing is estranged from her husband, her allowance has been cut, and she's given up her writing career. On top of this, her five beautiful but infamous sisters continue making headlines with their controversial politics.



Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war. Between the shop's brisk business and the literary salons she hosts for her eccentric friends, Nancy's life seems on the upswing. But when a mysterious French officer insists that she has a story to tell, Nancy must decide if picking up the pen again and revealing all is worth the price she might be forced to pay.



Eighty years later, Heywood Hill is abuzz with the hunt for a lost wartime manuscript written by Nancy Mitford. For one woman desperately in need of a change, the search will reveal not only a new side to Nancy, but an even more surprising link between the past and present...



*Don't miss The Beautiful People, Michelle Gable's next novel. On sale in April 2024 and available to preorder now!

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Gable (A Paris Apartment) immerses readers into parallel narratives of two authors revolving around a London bookshop. American novelist Katie Cabot's writing career seems to have stalled. Eager to get away from her overbearing family in present-day Northern Virginia and their advice about her recent breakup with her fiancé, Armie, Katie travels to London to see a friend. There, Katie visits Heywood Hill Ltd., a decades-old bookstore where famed novelist Nancy Mitford worked during WWII, and meets Simon Bailey, an attractive teacher who is eager to find Nancy's missing unpublished memoir, which he learned about when reading letters from Nancy to his grandmother Lea, who lived at Rutland Gate, where Nancy's friend housed war refugees. As Katie helps Simon by searching for the missing manuscript at Heywood Hill, the attraction between the two builds, but is complicated by Armie's unexpected arrival in London. Gable's witty narrative effortlessly moves between two time periods and is enriched with cameos by historical figures and authentic, memorable characters. Historical fiction fans will be riveted from the first page. Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Literary. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

Despondent over the breaking of her engagement and fretting over a debilitating case of writer's block, best-selling novelist Katharine Cabot accepts her dear friend's generous offer to visit her in London, where Kate finds herself in the same posh neighborhood once frequented by her literary idol, Nancy Mitford. Bonus points for being just a short walk away from the bookshop where Mitford worked when she, too, grappled with a publishing slump, unexpected poverty, and relationship complications during WWII. Armed with rumors of an unpublished Mitford manuscript, Kate hounds the shop owner for access to Mitford's papers, and encounters the dashing young Simon Bailey, who has his own reasons for pursing the same elusive treasure. Toggling seamlessly in time between the present and the 1940s, Gable (The Summer I Met Jack, 2018) handles Mitford's actual and Cabot's fictional romantic and professional challenges with a sparkling sauciness. The notorious Mitford sisters have always been a rich fount of mystery, scandal, and intrigue, and Gable's vision of Nancy Mitford's wartime years sheds the light of probability on a relatively unexamined portion of her life and career. A cunning blend of historical fiction, fetching romance, and literary thriller, Gable's newest novel is sure to reinvigorate interest in Mitford and beguile fans of light-hearted relationship fiction.

Kirkus Book Review

A London bookshop serves as backdrop to the lives and loves of two women from different centuries. The novel toggles back and forth between the story of (real-life) struggling author Nancy Mitford's life during World War II and present-day (fictional) struggling author Katharine Cabot's transformative visit to London. When the novel opens on Nancy's story, the war is in full effect, London is being bombed nightly, and Nancy has just taken a job working at the Heywood Hill bookshop. Nancy and her seven siblings are something of a legend: Of her five sisters, one is a Hitler sympathizer, one a fascist, one a communist, and one a duchess. Nancy takes up spying for the British government by befriending a French colonel who becomes both her lover and her most eager audience for stories of her life, inspiring her to finally write her first successful novel loosely based on her own dramatic family and upbringing. Katie, meanwhile, after a truly spectacular meltdown during a family celebration in Virginia, mostly driven by her frustration with writer's block, travels to London. Visiting the same Heywood Hill bookshop, she meets a handsome stranger who believes Nancy Mitford wrote a memoir during World War II that was never published; he would love to get his hands on that manuscript because of a family connection to the story. Katie is quickly absorbed by both the mystery of the manuscript and the charms of the man himself, and their literary investigations also inspire her to break free of the constrictions of her life and writer's block. Despite the complexity of the narrative structure, the novel seems somewhat one-note. The mysteries of the past are not overly gripping, though Nancy is an enjoyable character, as is the delightfully snooty Evelyn Waugh. But Katie elicits little deep interest, coming across as whiny and self-pitying. Ultimately, the novel suffers from its split focus. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.