The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted
Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm - he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep - but Tom's been lonely since Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers.
Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. When she asks him to help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy.
But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a battle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.
I was drawn to this book by the cover first and then the synopsis. If you are looking for a book about Book Shops, then this is not what it is about. Yes there is a Book Shop, but it is about so much more.
Normally I don't like books that have a past and present time line running simultaneously. It seems to be the in thing at the moment, maybe to allow books to be longer than they other wise would be. But in this case it was to emphasise what had gone on in Hannah's life before she came to Australia. It explained her reasons for being how she was.
Tom was an accidental farmer and I did feel that he seemed to be able to do so much in so little time. I didn't get the feeling that it was a particularly big farm, especially as he was milking a few cows by hand twice a day. No easy task and he must have had a good price for the milk to make it worth his while.
Tom didn't come across as your macho Aussie, although he had no qualms about shooting sheep worrying dogs and I had not problems with that either. This is how life is and still is for farmers around the world.
This was the 60s when men still ruled and coercive behaviour hadn't been seen as anything untoward.
A well written and engrossing read.
My copy was provided by NetGalley for review.