📘 The titular bookshop is owned by Jean Perdu, a lonely man around fifty, who, twenty one years ago bought a barge and restored it into a floating bookshop on the Seine. He named the barge "Literary Apothecary", since Perdu has a rare gift of seeing through his customer's soul, and sensing which books would heal their wounded soul. Ironically, it was his own soul that he failed to heal. Twenty six years ago, he had had a love affair with a Provençal girl called Manon, even when knowing that Manon would marry her fiancée Luc. However, one day Manon left him, without warning or explicable reason. This had hit Perdu very hard, that he didn't even open the letter Manon had left him. He just kept in inside the drawer of a table in the room of his apartment building in Rue Montagnard where they'd been together, and shut that room forever. He had been living as an eccentric recluse ever since. 📘 Until one day, a woman moved in, who has apparently been dumped by her husband with nothing except the clothes she wore. And, since Jean Perdu owns an unused table, he reluctantly gifted it to the newly-widowed woman called Catherine. There in the drawer, she found the unopened letter from Manon, who had told him that she was actually dying of cancer! The truth knocked Jean so hard, that he impulsively decided to raise the anchor of the Literary Apothecary, and set-off to Provence in search of... what exactly? He didn't know either at that moment. Just when the barge is about to unmoor, Max, his emerging-writer-neighbour at Rue Montagnard who's been depressed over his writer-block, asked Jean to take him along. And so, off go the two men, who, along the journey would become like father and son. They are, later on, joined by another broken-hearted Italian man called Cuneo, whose real passion is cooking. These trio's journey was to become a rediscovering-of-one's-soul and the healing process to remove any past wound, and to find new life, and... love! 📘 What I loved most of the book is Perdu and co.'s journey on board the book barge. I loved the glimpses of small harbour town or countryside that dotted the river banks. I loved the freedom of the three men, who, due to their hasty departure, didn't bring enough money to buy food and supplies, and therefore were selling books whenever they moored for the day. That journey is an escapist's or armchair traveler's dream. My least favorite part is Manon's diary. Manon is the woman Jean Perdu had been grieving about. How could I like a woman who was egotistic enough to love two men at the same time; and marry the one, and expected the other - the lover - to never leave her. Couldn't she see that that would break both men? But egotistic persons seldom can see things from others' perspective, always from their own selves. That marred the book for me, but the rest is entertaining enough. The book barge (it's a pity that it was never mentioned again at the end - Literary Apothecary deserves a better ending!); the joie de vivre that you can feel in your bone through the book; the small town or countryside of their transits; the food; the passionate French; and... Provence. What an appropriate book to close my #ParisinJuly2026 - many thanks to our fabulous host: Emma :). Au revoir!
Favorite quotes:
"It was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people."
Read for: Paris in July 2026 hosted by Emma @ Words and Peace"Memories are like wolves. You can't lock them away and hope they leave you alone."
