Jean’s world is turned upside-down when a new neighbour, Catherine, moves into the apartment building. ‘Reading – an endless journey a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind.’ He is astute at diagnosing what his customers need, often with hilarious accuracy. In contrast, his floating bookshop is his ‘literary apothecary’, where he prescribes books for all kinds of ailments of the heart, mind, and soul for his customers. The story begins with Jean Perdu living in a quirky apartment building in Paris, going about his daily routine, which mostly consists of a regimented adherence to certain ways of doing things, to avoid any depth of feeling and emotional reaction. There are some extremely philosophical quotable paragraphs and sentences, some that have become amongst my favourite literary quotes. I realise that the English translation is not the same experience as reading the book in its native language (French, of course), but the translated language is beautiful. It has characters you can root for, an undeniably bookish theme with Jean Perdu’s wonderful book apothecary on a barge moored in the Seine, and enough depth and emotional wisdom to offset the potential twee-ness of the story. The Little Paris Bookshop has everything I like in a book.
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