The Lost Bookshop is the story of Opaline, a woman who lived in England in the 1920s, and Martha and  Henry, who are contemporaries. All three of them are book lovers and in their individual journeys, they come together in unexpected ways.

The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the three main characters, where Opaline lived over a hundred years before the other two. As the plot develops, we learn how Opaline’s life affected Martha’s and Henry’s in unexpected ways.

The main themes are illustrating the class system of English society, and above all the role women played as sub-humans, basically the chattel of the men in their lives, which was very true for Opaline a hundred years ago, and still true for Martha today due to her abusive husband.

The story weaves around Emily Bronte’s only novel, the classic Wuthering Heights. The characters believe that she might have written another manuscript that was never published before she died at age 30 from tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights became one of the most famous works in English literature shortly after she died.

One might say this book is about Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights, because the entire plot is developed around her character. So much so that I decided to dust off the book in my Kindle library and start reading it again. See my review here.

The Lost Bookshop is an entertaining read, full of nostalgia, some outright magic, quite a bit of mystery and above all outrage about the suffering of women, through history, and up to today.