Talk to The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
A.J. Fikry runs Island Books, the only bookstore on Alice Island off the Massachusetts coast, and he is doing it badly. His wife has recently died, he is drinking too much, and the store is barely surviving. When a publishing sales rep named Amelia arrives to try to sell him books he doesn't want, and when an abandoned toddler named Maya appears in the store with a note from her mother, A.J.'s curated solitude begins to unravel. The novel follows him over the next decade and more, through his relationship with Maya, his relationship with Amelia, and the community of readers that forms around his store.
What Zevin has written is a love letter to books and readers, constructed with enough self-awareness to mostly avoid sentimentality. Each chapter opens with A.J.'s note on a short story — his recommendation to Maya, a kind of literary curriculum — and the choices are real (Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Roald Dahl) and tell you something about who A.J. is and how he's changing. The device works both for readers who know the stories and readers who don't; it gives the novel a texture that a simpler structure wouldn't provide.
What it gets right
- 1.
The epigraph-chapter device — A.J.'s short story recommendations to Maya — is both a portrait of his character and a genuine literary education embedded in the novel's structure.
- 2.
Grief is shown as something that opens people rather than only closes them — A.J. becomes capable of love precisely after his losses have stripped his defenses.
- 3.
The independent bookstore is treated as a community institution, not just a retail business, and the novel makes a quiet case for why that distinction matters.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Gabrielle Zevin is an American novelist, screenwriter, and author of children's books. She published her debut novel, Elsewhere, in 2005 and has written widely across age groups since. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) became a word-of-mouth bestseller adopted enthusiastically by independent bookstores and librarians. Her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022), about two game developers navigating a decades-long creative partnership, became a major bestseller and was widely named one of the best novels of the year. She lives in Los Angeles.
