With Love from London
With Love from London
Synopsis
Valentina Baker was eleven when her mother, Eloise, left California and returned to her native London without her. Two decades later Val is a librarian in her thirties, freshly divorced and adrift, when word arrives that Eloise has died — and left her a Primrose Hill flat and the Book Garden, the bookshop she ran there for nearly twenty years.
Val flies to London to see the shop and stays to save it. The Book Garden is in debt and the inheritance taxes are steep, and keeping the doors open means learning the neighbourhood, its regulars, and the woman her mother actually was. Eloise has left one more thing behind: a scavenger hunt of clues tucked into her favourite novels, meant to lead her daughter through the story she never told.
Sarah Jio braids Val's present-day chapters with Eloise's, beginning in 1968, and lets the two women's lives explain one another. It is a warm, bookish novel about abandonment, forgiveness, and the possibility of building a life in a place you never chose.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Valentina BakerProtagonist
An American librarian who inherits her estranged mother's London bookshop after her death.
EloiseProtagonist
Val's mother, whose life in London from the late 1960s onward forms the novel's past timeline.
Places
Edition
With Love from LondonUnknown, 2022Center Point Large PrintLanguage: EnglishISBN: 9781638082309
2 editions available
