(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Challenging the status quo is never an easy task.
Especially when it’s 19th century England, where Victorian propriety of the most suffocating kind rules, at least for those in the upper classes, and where one small step, however intentional or unintentional, can mean social death of the most damning and exclusionary kind.
It’s this rigidly unrelenting world that the protagonist of The Lamplight’s Bookshop by Sophie Austin, Evelyn Seaton, who has been presented to Queen Victoria and who occupies the social strata of society (though some of her family’s compatriots believes that the Seatons do not really belong there; they are, after all, the wrong kind of rich), finds herself falling down the social strata after family machinations her and her mother far from the mansion they once called home.
How that all comes to pass must be left to spoilers and an engaging narrative that sets the scene quite beautifully and with an keen eye both on the history and the humanity of it all, but suffice to say that when Evelyn and her mother end up at her crotchety Aunt Clara’s wonky townhouse in York, they are without means and certainly shorn clean of options of returning to the life they once knew.
While Evelyn’s mother Cecilia refuses to believe their fall from grace is a permanent one, her climb up the ladder so well realised that she can’t believe it might have come to an end, Evelyn is made of far more grounded stuff and sets about fashioning a life that will fit with their new constrained circumstances.
It was only then she noticed the mismatched gargoyles that flanked the door: one with its stone muzzle drawn up over its teeth, the other rather more placid, with its tongue hanging from its jaw. On one of them hung an exceedingly small sign – declaring that the shop was, in fact, open, and suggesting that visitors come in and shout, for the bell wasn’t working.
The oak door sighed on its hinges as Evelyn stepped inside.
The only problem with her highly practical approach?
It flies in the face of tightly held ideas by Cecilia that women should not work, much less in shops, and that the society she once saw as her own (though, and she is blind to this, they did not embrace her back) will take them back in as their own and provide an elegant solution to their current existential trials.
Still, Evelyn can’t wait for her mother to make her peace with the cruel reality of their new world, one which pays no heed to letters to the gentry or the possible work they might do on the Seatons’ behalf (read none) and answers an ad for an assistant at the Lamplighter’s Bookshop, more formally known as Morgan’s Emporium, hoping to earn some money and pave the way for a future than she can control and which doesn’t depend for success on the whims and prevarications of the idle rich.
The Lamplighter’s Bookshop is a shop lost to time, its windows dirty, its signs faded and its books ordered by an arcane system so impenetrable that only its owner, Howard Morton, has any idea where anything is.
Quirky it might be but moneymaking it is not, and after Evelyn is taken on as an assistant after wearing Howard down, it takes a good deal of work to get it looking as inviting as the more modern bookshops that surround it.
(courtesy official author page)
Her task is complicated all the more by the arrival of Howard’s writer nephew, William, newly arrived home from London where he has supposedly landed a big publishing deal and received a dazzlingly big advance, his return back to York all in aid of finishing the book that will make a big deal in the very bookshop in which he grew up, taken in by his uncle when family circumstances saw him days away from going to a hateful workhouse.
Naturally, Evelyn and William clash, he from a world where you make your own luck and her from one where it is handed to you on a gilder platter, and it’s their opposites attract story, and the tightly held secrets which power it (both are hiding something, or rather a lot of somethings) and it’s this frisson which powers the gloriously momentum of The Lamplight’s Bookshop throughout its endlessly beguiling length.
It is, for all intents and purposes a romantic comedy, but a beautifully written and achingly empathetic one which takes us into a world where making your own way, of defying the accepted order of things and cleaving close to your destiny are not easily won, if at all.
When all of Evelyn and William’s individual aspirations threaten to come to nothing, and hard fought-for gains unravel almost to nothing, they must come together in ways not easy or comfortable to admit to but which will be the making of them in a story that believes in happy endings but only after a great sadness has washed under the figurative bridge.
‘Uncle Howard?’ he called. ‘Do you think you could manage without me for a few hours?’
‘Of course,’ Uncle Howard called back.
‘Good,’ said William, grabbing his jacket and stepping out into the cool, autumn breeze with Jack. ‘Because I have something I need to do.’
The Lamplight’s Bookshop is an absolute joy to read.
While Austin sticks closely to the social mores of the day, and acknowledges at all points how strict they can be, she also makes a way for those who will not, or more pointedly cannot yield to these strictures, to discover a way forward that is theirs and theirs alone.
The fact that Evelyn and William will come to share this journey is clear early on, but even so, The Lamplight’s Bookshop possesses a great deal of tension and alarming what-ifs that makes its reading thrilling and exciting, and yes, comforting, all in one.
It’s an exemplary writing job that takes you in, holds you there happily and willingly and which delivers time and again in ways big and dramatically epic but also intimate, very human and yes, even funny too.
While the rom-com aspect is a huge part of the book, both for Williams and Evelyn, and their mutual friends Jack and Naomi (who are pushing against societal norms in their own way, an interracial couple in an age not tolerant of such a thing), the great strength of The Lamplight’s Bookshop is in its capacity to celebrate and elevate choice and agency over inevitable destiny and fate and to allow its two main characters, against considerable challenges, to find their happy-ever-after in an age where doing your own thing was rare and often a complete impossibility.