I just finished this book for my next book club meeting, and honestly, it was really ho-hum to me. Perhaps I'm not such a lover of French sensibilities and would have preferred the setting of England and a bit more of an uptight Englishman as the main character. Perhaps I just didn't have much empathy for a guy who had an affair with a married woman who left him over twenty years before. Perhaps I could barely relate to the books and authors mentioned in Ms. George's book. Many of the titles and books mentioned were fake, not even real, and that annoyed me. I think I'm being generous giving this book three stars. I should probably give it less, but I can't say it was the worst book I've ever read, just one that I never care to pick up again.
The book concerns a 50 year old man named Jean Perdu who runs a Literary Apothecary on a barge on the Seine in Paris. Mr. Perdu has the ability to be able to ask a few questions of a customer and instantly figure out which book will cure what ails them, even if they don't know that they have an ailment. However, Mr. Perdu's ailment is that he still grieves the woman who left him 20 years before without saying good-bye. When he finds a letter she wrote him that he never opened, he discovers that things were not as they seemed two decades before. Along with some new friends, Mr. Perdu unmoors his bookshop barge and takes it down the canals and rivers of France all the way to the Provence.
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