Description
The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher is a historical novel about Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller who opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1919. The shop quickly became a gathering place for writers of the Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway, and a centre of literary friendship and exchange. When James Joyce’s Ulysses is banned, Sylvia takes the extraordinary risk of publishing it herself.
As the book’s success brings financial pressure, competing publishers and personal complications, Sylvia faces the possibility of losing the shop she has built. Set against the cultural life of 1920s Paris and the growing hardships of the Depression, the novel explores books, friendship, ambition and the determination to give important writing a place in the world.
