The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

We all have moments in our lives that we know we are at a fork in the road and the choice of direction we take will shape the person we then become. Sometimes the road we chose gets tough and then we might start to wonder 'What if...?' and that is the premise for this book.

I really enjoyed it as it is set in America in the early 1960s, right about the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the era of J F Kennedy, and everything from the clothes to the way of life is exactly as I remember it. The story centres on a young single woman called Kitty who works with her best friend running a modest bookshop, and all seems right in her world until she starts to have the strangest dreams. Every time she goes to sleep she finds herself living a completely different lifestyle as a married woman living in a smart suburban house with her husband and three children.

At first, she enjoys the dreams, although she walks through her new found world as a stranger and at first doesn't even know the names and ages of her children, which makes things awkward. The man she married in her dream world is a man she might have met up with after placing an advertisement in the local paper, but in her real life he never turned up, and she remained single.

Some things are common to both her lives as she has her cat in both places, and her parents are always there, but the longer the dreams go on, the more she realises that this alternate lifestyle is not as perfect as she first thought it was. As time goes on, she just wants it all to stop and she starts to feel as though she doesn't properly belong anywhere any more, but every time she goes to sleep she finds herself waking on the other side.

Although the book is set in the middle of the last century, there is a clear modern feel to the writing and I'm not surprised to see that it is a New York Times Bestseller and 'soon to be a major film'. Apparently Julia Roberts has been signed up to take the lead and I can see that working. Overall it's a great book but probably more appealing to woman than men.

Comments

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