Despite one book being unfortunately PINK, Purves lets you into how women feel in mid-family raising. In these novels you’ll get it too. (Free Woman, Casting Off). She shows you how a family operates, what can tear it down, build it up. A modern Dickens but not as long-winded, Purves KNOWS who these women are.
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This is a picture of me when I was a young (ish) bookseller. The Sunday Magazine did a lengthy article on the three major out of print and antiquarian dealers. There were 35 bookshops altogether n our small Canadian border town back then in the 1980’s. Now there are seven, two of them [...]

You know I’m a retired bookseller, sometime prison librarian, writer and general raver when I find a writer that does it? I’m fussy and discriminating, not into the F– word being thrown around as an excuse for abandoning excellent writing. I’VE GOT STANDARDS!
Which is where A. Lee Martinez comes in. Whatta dream! [...]

Just finished ‘Jane Bites Back’ by Michael Thomas Ford. Jane Austen is now a vampire who owns a bookshop in a smallish town, where she sells copies of her books, bemoaning the loss of royalties and tries to get a new book published.
Meanwhile she is harrassed by Lord Byron who is the [...]