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by Cynthia Swanson
A provocative and hauntingly powerful debut novel reminiscent of Sliding Doors, The Bookseller follows a woman in the 1960s who must reconcile her reality with the tantalizing alternate world of her dreams.
Nothing is as permanent as it appears...
Denver, 1962: Kitty Miller has come to terms with her unconventional single life. She loves the bookshop she runs with her best friend, Frieda, and enjoys complete control over her day-to-day existence. She can come and go as she pleases, answering to no one. There was a man once, a doctor named Kevin, but it didn't quite work out the way Kitty had hoped.Then the dreams begin.
Denver, 1963: Katharyn Andersson is married to Lars, the love of her life. They have beautiful children, an elegant home, and good friends. It's everything Kitty Miller once believed she wanted - but it only exists when she sleeps.
Convinced that these dreams are simply due to her overactive imagination, Kitty enjoys her nighttime forays into this alternate world. But with each visit, the more irresistibly real Katharyn's life becomes. Can she choose which life she wants? If so, what is the cost of staying Kitty, or becoming Katharyn?
As the lines between her worlds begin to blur, Kitty must figure out what is real and what is imagined. And how do we know where that boundary lies in our own lives?
"Starred Review. This is a stunner of a debut novel, astonishingly tight and fast paced." - Library Journal
"Dexterously traversing past and present, fact and fiction, Swanson's clever first novel ingeniously explores the inventive ways the human spirit copes with trauma." - Booklist
"Swanson masterfully crafts both Kitty's and Katharyn's worlds, leaving open the question of which of them is real until the final pages. Swanson's evocative novel freshly considers the timeless question, 'What if?" - Publishers Weekly
"Unfortunately, Kitty is too perfect and naive in both her worlds to be very interesting. And for a novel about a bibliophile, there's little about books beyond an adolescent interest." - Kirkus
"Swanson's debut novel is slightly mysterious and thoroughly engrossing, one of those books that will stay with the reader long after it is complete." - Romantic Times
"In The Bookseller, writing with a sharp-tinged empathic pen, Cynthia Swanson takes us on a startling journey where a woman is thrust into the alternative world that might have been, had she made different choices." - Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage
"Cynthia Swanson's The Bookseller is both a delightful and haunting exploration of identity, love and loss." - Joanna Hershon, author of A Dual Inheritance
"I inhaled The Bookseller… A deeply satisfying read." - Ann Napolitano, author of A Good Hard Look
This information about The Bookseller was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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