December Fiction

A cosy Christmas read is on the cards for our December fiction pick

The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan Sphere, £14.99

WHATEVER ELSE proves in short supply this Christmas, it won’t be the kind of festive romantic fiction designed to be a winter warmer for its primarily female readership. By my perhaps conservative reckoning, there are approximately 50 new novels around in this category. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine any doing a better job than The Christmas Bookshop— where, once again, Jenny Colgan manages the neat trick of staying utterly faithful to the conventions of the genre, while also smuggling in some sharp comedy and keen social observation.

Carmen, like many a romcom heroine, is approaching 30 and not feeling good about herself. Single and working a dead-end job in a dying Scottish town, she keeps hearing from her mother about how well her sister Sofia is doing as a high-flying (and thin) Edinburgh lawyer with three children.

Worse, when that dead-end job finally goes, it’s Sofia who comes to the rescue. Reluctantly, Carmen moves into her sister’s gorgeous house and starts the job Sofia has arranged for her in a second-hand bookshop. The shop has potential but, as chaotically run by its owner, will close if Carmen can’t turn it around by Christmas, now a matter of weeks away. So what could possibly go right?