The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted - Robert Hillman

I read and review so many books with the words “bookstore” or “bookshop” in the title that I could never hope to hide my attraction to them.  Spotting a new one of those on a bookstore shelf is sure to stop me in my tracks – and as often as not, the book ends up going home with me.  That’s, in fact, exactly how I found Robert Hillman’s The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted.  I enjoy the bookstore setting of this kind of book, but just as important to me are all those little “insider” references sprinkled throughout them that only an avid reader will appreciate or even much understand.

The Bookshop of the Broken Heartedis a little different, though, from what I expected it would be because, while it does have plenty of bookish references, it is not primarily set inside a bookstore.  Rather, a bookstore is the device used by the author to bring the novel’s two main characters together so that the rest of their story can be told.  It is 1968, and Tom lives alone on the small Australian sheep ranch he’s inherited from his family. His wife has twice left him, the second time taking with her the little boy he considered to be a son.  Hannah is a Holocaust survivor who has come to Australia to begin the rest of her life. She has buried two husbands, her only child, and everyone else in her family by the time she arrives in the little town nearest Tom’s ranch.  Fate takes a hand when Hannah, after more than a year in town, decides to open up what will be the only bookstore anywhere around – and she asks Tom to build the shelves she will need to display the 7500 books with which she wants to open the store.

Author Robert Hillman

Tom and Hannah feel an almost immediate connection between them, and suddenly a man who has read only one book in his entire adult life finds himself spending more time in a bookstore than he does with his sheep and cattle.  But the emotional baggage being carried by Tom and Hannah makes their relationship a fragile one from the beginning.  If it is to survive, they will have to figure out a way to incorporate two little boys (one dead and one very much alive) into their lives.  For Hannah, that may not be possible.  Upon Tom’s advice, Hannah calls her new bookstore simply “Hannah’s Bookshop.” Perhaps more fitting, would have been her first choice of a name for the store, “The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted,” because seldom have two more broken hearted people tried to start a new life together.

Hillman did manage to work in a few of the kind of bookstore details that I enjoy.  Here are a couple of them:

·     “But even here in Hometown, Australia, the censors must be accommodated. Her solution was to display a block of wood where a banned title would have been shelved. On each block she attached a label: Borstal Boyis banned in Australia.  Apply at the counter for a summary of the story. Or Lady Chatterley’s Loveror Eros and Civilization. The summaries were in Hannah’s head. She intended to rattle off the comings and goings recorded in the banned books for anyone with enough curiosity.”  (Remember, this is 1968.)

·     “They were in the shop, shelves of books competing in allure, arranged by title rather than writer – Hannah’s democratic bias.  She didn’t want sections of shelves turned into colonies of titles by the same author. Writers had to muck in together.”

Bottom Line: This one will appeal to fans of bookstore novels, but it will probably be appreciated even more by fans of historical fiction and the more serious romance fiction. It’s two main characters are memorable ones, and the novel offers an interesting look at life in rural Australia fifty or so years ago.

Book Number 3,414