The Lost Bookshop

In 1921, Opaline Carlisle is 21 years old, and her mother and brother have decided that she needs to marry. Her family needs money, and Lyndon, her brother, who is 18 years her senior, has arranged for her to marry a wealthy acquaintance. Lyndon was deeply scarred during World War I. He returned from the war changed, and Opaline fears him now. However, because their father is dead, Lyndon manages the family now and expects total obedience.

However, Opaline has no intention of marrying. She wants to experience the modern world. Women can vote and work now, so she doesn’t need to marry. She has even cut her hair short. Her father, who instilled a deep love of books and reading in her, gifted her some valuable first-edition books. So, to escape the arranged marriage, she sells her beloved first-edition copy of David Copperfield and uses the money to run away to Paris. This is how she begins her career as a book dealer.

In contemporary times, Martha arrives in Dublin with a black eye, bruised ribs, no money, and no plan. She has just left an abusive relationship. She finds work as a live-in housekeeper for Madame Bowden, who owns a house at 12 Ha’penny Lane. The woman is elderly and eccentric, but the job includes a small flat in the basement of the house. Most importantly, Bowden asks no questions.

On her first day on the job, Martha sees a pair of men’s shoes outside her basement window and panics briefly, fearing that her husband, Shane, has found her. However, she opens the window and sees a strange man who introduces himself as Henry. She accuses him of being a peeping tom, but he says he’s merely looking for something and that it would be too difficult to explain what. She tells him to go away and slams the window shut.

Henry sits in a pub reviewing his notes about lost manuscripts. He has been obsessed with rare books since he was a child, even using money his mother gave him to attend the London Rare Books School. Now he has found a letter written by one of the most successful rare book collectors, Mr. Rosenbach, to a woman named Opaline Gray, about a lost manuscript she claimed to have found. Henry thinks this could be the break he needs to earn acclaim. He blames his need for recognition on his father, who drank and was abusive when Henry was a child.

Henry travels from England to Dublin in search of the bookshop to which the letter was addressed. However, the bookshop doesn’t appear to exist. He was wandering Ha’penny Lane in search of it when he met the girl in the basement window, Martha. Feeling unable to explain his search, he left. Now, leaving the pub, he returns to his bed and breakfast (B&B) for the night.

Back in the 1920s storyline, Opaline takes passage from Dover, England to Paris, France. She tells only her friend Jane she’s leaving, via a telegram. On the ship to Paris, Opaline meets a handsome man with a French accent who introduces himself as Armand Hassan and flirts with her. She finds him equally charming and arrogant, and they part ways.

In Paris, Opaline looks for work and fails. She realizes that no one wants to hire a British girl who knows little French and has few skills. While walking, she sees a bookseller that is featuring a copy of Histoires Extraordinaires, a French-language translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s work by Charles Baudelaire. She buys the book and then runs into Armand again. Armand teasingly explains that he’d intended to buy that book, flirts more, and invites Opaline to dinner. She declines, but he gives her his calling card in case she changes her mind. From the card she learns that Armand is originally from Morocco and is a rare books dealer.

In the contemporary storyline, Martha relaxes as she works as a housekeeper, growing less paranoid about her husband finding her. One day, Madame Bowden tells her to dust the antique books in her library. Martha is envious of the education the books imply, while also reflecting on her long antagonism with reading.

Instead, she prefers to read people, an uncanny skill that allows her to read the histories and feelings of people around her. She believed everyone could do this until her friends became upset over the secrets she could reveal. She recalls that she could no longer read her husband once she fell in love with him, implying that love truly is blind. She once believed she had a special skill, a destiny, a path she was meant to follow, but Shane crushed that feeling and she no longer believes it.

The bookshop address at 11 Ha’penny Lane doesn’t exist. The buildings on the street go from 10 to 12 with no space for a bookshop between them. Henry wanders to the house at 12 Ha’penny Lane as if the bookshop will magically appear and sees Martha walking out. Hoping she might know about the bookshop, he offers to buy her coffee.

He explains his search to Martha, who summarizes: “[Y]ou found an old letter that mentions a book no one’s ever heard of, hidden in a bookshop that doesn’t exist” (39). Henry, assuming that Martha must own the house, asks if she knows anything about its history or about any bookshop. Martha explains she’s only the housekeeper, leaving them both embarrassed.

Back in the 1920s storyline, Opaline wanders into a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company and meets the owner, Sylvia Beach. Opaline asks for a job and Sylvia hires her as an apprentice. Sylvia explains what makes books valuable. Not every old book is rare; only when “both hard to find and highly sought after” (45) is it rare and valuable. Additionally, serious collectors want not only books but also manuscripts, prints, even letters, and anything else that can “feed the insatiable curiosity that surrounds the greatest minds” (45).

Opaline is unsure why anyone would want letters or other non-book items, and Sylvia asks her who her favorite author is and what she’d like to know about that author. Opaline answers that her favorite author is Emily Brontë, and she wishes to know if she began another novel before her death, and if so, what might have happened to it. Sylvia responds that Opaline now has the basis for her search.

In the contemporary storyline, Martha tells Madame Bowden about her run-in with Henry and his search for a mysterious bookshop. Madame Bowden tells Martha a story: She once held a party at her house. One guest arrived late and shaken because she had walked through a door believing it was the house but instead found herself inside a charming old bookshop filled with antique books and oddities. Confused, she walked back out to the street and turned around, and “poof! The shop was gone” (49). Martha surmises that the house must once have been attached to a bookshop next door.

One afternoon, Martha realizes that, for the first time, she has both money and free time, so she goes shopping. She wanders into a library, but she doesn’t know how borrowing from a library works. When she starts to put a book in her bag without checking it out, a librarian loudly confronts her. Embarrassed, she puts the book back and is trying to leave when she sees Henry.

Henry hears the librarian shout at Martha. He walks over to help, and they walk out of the library together. Henry explains that he found an old book catalogue printed by the woman from his letter, Opaline Gray, in the 1920s. He’s determined to find out more about her and the lost manuscript because he’s writing his thesis on lost manuscripts and why they fascinate people so much.

He tells her the story of Walter Benjamin, a Jewish writer who escaped Nazi-controlled France during World War II, and whose manuscript was lost when he died by suicide. Henry recognizes in Martha’s expression that she, like him, has been “bitten by the same bug. The unrequited love for what might have been, if not for these cruel acts of fate” (59).

Henry wonders if Opaline Gray might have been part of the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s. Martha searches the internet and in minutes finds a photograph taken in the 1920s, captioned: “Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, shop assistant Opaline Carlisle” (60). Henry now realizes that Opaline Gray must be a pseudonym or married name.