Of Wheels And Words

Cars and books are metal and paper to the uninitiated, but offer appreciative souls the liberation that they seek.

NINA George is the author of The Little Paris Bookshop, which revolves around a bookseller who regards his bookshop on a restored barge on the river Seine as a sort of “literary apothecary”.

He is like a literary physician who can diagnose whatever is troubling his customers and prescribes books to soothe their souls.

One of the lines in the novel struck a chord in me: “Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.”