The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin's novel "The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry" centers on A.J. Fikry, the curmudgeonly owner of Island Books, a failing independent bookstore on Alice Island off the Massachusetts coast. Recently widowed, A.J. is drinking too much, driving customers away with his rudeness, and guarding a rare Edgar Allan Poe volume, Tamerlane, as a retirement fund. The story's distinctive structure comes from A.J.'s habit of prefacing each chapter with a short note recommending a story to his daughter, Maya, so the book doubles as a bookseller's canon of short fiction. Those notes connect to the chapter that follows and trace his changing tastes over the years. The plot turns on two arrivals: a publisher's sales representative, Amelia Loman, who keeps returning to pitch her house's titles, and a two-year-old girl, Maya, abandoned in the store with a note asking that she be raised among books. A.J. adopts her, and the novel follows the years that reshape the shop, the island community, and A.J. himself, including his slow courtship of Amelia. Chief's, the local police officer and a fellow reader, becomes a recurring presence through the store's informal reading tastes, and A.J. struggles with a declining market for literary fiction while embracing Maya's future. The book is, at heart, about how booksellers and readers build families and second chances through shared reading. Zevin, herself a former bookseller, keeps the tone wry rather than saccharine, and the novel became a bestseller and a book-club favorite after its 2014 release.