Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore

[lightreads]

Nonfiction, memoir. A novelist, recovering from cancer, takes a part-time job in an independent bookstore. This is brilliant, in that understated way which creeps up on you. She's got that trick of describing entirely ordinary things like constructing holiday book displays with deep, resonant emotion. The conceit is bibliophilic and beautiful: books and the people who love them as a healing force. In between insights on the publishing and marketing worlds and discussions of customer satisfaction, there are little glimpses of a shattered life slowly mending. Subtle, quietly chatty, informative, intensely
but unobtrusively personal.