What is The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry about?

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.

The book is deliberately modest in scope. Alice Island is small and self-contained; the cast is manageable; the problems faced are human-scale. Zevin is interested in showing that a life organized around reading and independent bookselling is a legitimate and meaningful life, not a consolation prize. The novel came out in 2014 as independent bookstores were beginning to recover from the Amazon disruption, and it landed in that moment with unusual force among the bookseller and librarian community, who adopted it as something close to a professional text.

This is comfort reading for people who take books seriously — it assumes that you care about the distinction between a good book and a bad one, that you have opinions about short stories, and that you understand why a person might spend their life selling books for a living. Readers who don't share those preoccupations will find it charming but perhaps thin. Readers who do will find something close to the experience of talking with a very good reader about the things they love.