Thankyou Net Galley, the publisher and the author for the ARC of this book.

When it comes to reading, my tastes are very simple – mysteries, spy thrillers, history (fiction and nonfiction) and military fiction. My time periods range from ancient Rome to the Middle Ages to WWII and to the present. Every so often though, a book not in one of those categories catches my attention and it really affects me. THE BOOKSELLER'S SECRET is the latest such book. The author, whom I had not heard of before, MICHELLE GABLE, has written a masterpiece.

I was vaguely aware of Nancy Mitford, a mid-20th Century British author and her eccentric family through news stories and my affiliation with the book publishing industry (for nearly 50 years). And as a reader. As Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

This novel is based on fact. Ms. Gable explains what is real and what is not in a postscript. Some of the facts I checked via a Google search. The historic elements are accurate.

There are two narrators. During the years of WWII, Nancy Mitford is living in London through the Blitz and working in a bookstore. The bookstore is G. Heywood Hill Ltd. a real store that is still doing business. In the present day, it is Katie Cabot an American author living in Virginia near Washington, D.C. Both have a similar problem. They are both searching for the subject and storyline for their next book.

When Mitford is the narrator, the reader meets many of her friends and her family. Both groups contain wonderful characters who are a little off beat. Among Nancy’s family are communists, fascists and Nazis. One sister has been jailed for her pro-Nazi sympathies. The communist sister has moved to California (where else?) with her husband. The Mitford parents are of minor nobility. They have estates but little cash or income. Nancy needs the three pounds a week she gets from her job in the bookstore just to survive. One sister, Deborah, married the 11th Duke of Devonshire (their son, the 12th Duke, now owns the bookstore). Mitford is looking for a story that she can write that will become a bestseller. She had published three or four critically acclaimed novels, but financial busts, before the war.

Katie had written a couple of books that also were not financial successes. Her fiancé Armie had been her friend and then lover since they were five years old. She is in her mid to late thirties. Her best friend other than Armie is Jojo Boyers who met and married a British executive. Jojo lives in London with her four kids. Katie and Jojo went to school together from their earliest years through Cornell University in upstate New York. At Cornell, Katie’s senior year thesis was on Nancy Mitford.

Katie decides to visit Jojo after Thanksgiving (late November). Her friend tells her to visit the bookstore in the neighborhood. There she meets Simon Bailey who may or may not be a missing part of Mitford’s extended family.

This story provided me with a great deal of fun entertainment. If the whole COVID 19 pandemic is getting you down, read this book. You will feel much better if you do. If I could, I would give this book 10 stars on a zero-to-five-star scale. The author has a few other books available. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

GO! BUY! READ!

A fictional account of the lives of the Mitford sisters touching on their unusual upbringing and subsequent radical political views. Author Nancy Mitford is the focus here as a published American writer finds herself at ends when she can't commit to an idea for her now overdue next book. Having studied Mitford for her graduate work, Katie accepts an offer from her London friend to spend time there to get over the break up of her long engagement to Armie, her childhood friend and sweetheart. Discovering the bookshop where Nancy Mitford was employed during the war years and finding out through meeting a handsome teacher that the shop may contain Mitford's unpublished autobiography sets the two of them on a quest to discover the truth about the manuscript's existence. Along the way, the reader dives into alternating chapters written in both Nancy Mitford's and Katie's time periods and points of view. Obviously well researched, author Gable gives us insight into a pre-war world that produced some extraordinary writers and takes us behind the scenes into Mitford's daily struggles. Engaging.

This story is told in two timelines. Author Nancy Mitford, the oldest of the infamous society sisters, spent the war years running a bookshop in London and writing a never published autobiography and Katie Cabot,a novelist with writer's block and a Mitford fan, comes to modern London and becomes involved in a search for the missing manuscript. The novel alternates between the two storylines until the war ends and Nancy published her most famous novel instead of the autobiography and moves to Paris and Katie sorts through her problems and find inspiration for a new book.

The plots moved quickly but I found both main characters extremely unlikeable and had a difficult time caring what happened to them. Nancy Mitford's famous wit is caustic and hurtful and her behavior is entitled and selfish and Katie Cabot has too many of the same traits. It was a quick read and one I'll probably forget in a week.

This book sounded promising, especially the bookstore setting which I thought would lend to lots of dialogue about the magic of stories, but I was disappointed. Michelle Gable has written a fictional account of Nancy Mitford's time in England during WW2 working at a bookstore. I love dialogue in stories but because I found the characters unlikeable, it was hard to "listen" to their conversations. I didn't think the second storyline of Katie worked. Like Nancy, she was not likable either. And maybe that is the point. I went into this story not knowing anything about Nancy and her family.. Even though I did not care for this story, I must admit I do want to read Nancy's books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Thank you, NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed The Bookseller's Secret, although I don't think it's quite as strong as A Paris Apartment, which I enjoyed more.

First, the positives, I love a dual timeline and this one gets off to an interesting start with a missing manuscript. The Mitford family is fascinating and while there are a lot of characters to keep up with, they are fun to read about.

Now for a minor negative: the present day romance angle with Katie and Simon felt a little forced and I didn't love how the Nancy/Katie timelines tracked each other so closely.

Overall, The Bookseller's Secret is a fast-paced and entertaining dual timeline story.

Many thanks to Michelle Gable, Grayson House, and Net Galley for allowing me to read an ARC of “The Bookseller’s Secret”.

Ms. Gable very adeptly transports the reader to London during WWII as well as revealing the oddities of the Mitford sisters and family. Readers of WWII historical fiction and literary works will delight in this dual time-line novel.

Katherine Cabot travels to England to ease heartbreak and the writer’s block she’s experiencing. As an admirer of her literary heroine Nancy Mitford, she is thrilled to find the London bookshop where the famous writer was employed during the war. When she hears of a possible unpublished autobiography, she launches a search working with a handsome teacher, Simon, the grandson of Lea, a close acquaintance of Nancy’s during the war years. Katherine looks for a possible book to write; Simon seeks answers to a family secret. Using some of Nancy’s correspondence, she pieces together a possible scenario to work with but for the most part her progress is thwarted. Michelle Gable’s imagination gives us an excellent depiction of Nancy Mitford and the stresses and adventures she experienced during her lifetime. She has caught a woman with a somewhat flippant and liberated attitude to life, yet one who never loses the strong bonds of loyalty for family.

The Bookseller's Secret jumps between the present day and World War II, telling the stories of Katie Cabot, a present-daywriter with a serious case of writer's block, and World War II era Nancy Mitford. Katie, a Mitford scholar, travels to London to stay with a friend following a breakup, and learns that there might be a lost autobiography written by Nancy Mitford hiding in a neighborhood bookshop. Searching for the manuscript, she begins reading letters Nancy wrote, and learns how the idea of the autobiography came to be, and how it was ultimately discarded. This leads Katie to write again, and start her life over in London. An enjoyable book about the always entertaining Mitford sisters, whose life was truly stranger than fiction.

In 1942, London, Nancy Mitford is worried about more than air raids and German spies. She is recovering from a devastating loss, is estranged from her husband, her allowance has been cut, and she’s given up her writing career. On top of this, her five beautiful but infamous sisters continue making headlines with their controversial politics. Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war. Between the shop’s brisk business and the literary salons she hosts for her friends, Nancy’s life seems on the upswing. But when a mysterious French officer insists that she has a story to tell, Nancy must decide if picking up the pen again and revealing all is worth the price she might be forced to pay. Michelle Gable skillfully intertwines this narrative with a modern-day author with writer's block and is a fan of Nancy Mitford's writing and searches for information about the author as she works in the modern day version of the Heywood Hill bookshop.

This is a very interesting book about Nancy Mitford who I have run across before in my reading of WWII historical fiction. The characters are very well developed, especially the enigmatic Evelyn Waugh. I highly recommend the book for fans of WWII historical fiction and thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read it.

This was definitely not the book for me.

The premise of the The Bookseller’s Secret sounded promising: a dual timeline read featuring a between-books, Bright Young Thing author working in a bookstore during WWII and a modern-day struggling author looking for the former’s lost manuscript. It’s a book about books and book lovers, which I typically tend to enjoy. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a lot to like about this novel.

For starters, I only knew that Nancy Mitford was a real person because it was mentioned in the book’s description. I went into this book knowing nothing about her, and frankly, I still don’t feel that I know much about her, and what I do know, I don’t particularly like. Nancy is not a likeable character, which is fairly true to her real-life personality based on what I’ve read other places, but I couldn’t connect with her. She doesn’t really seem to care about anything or anyone but herself, and she’s rather overbearing and mean more than clever or witty. Her friends are obnoxious and arrogant, so I couldn’t even get behind the secondary characters. I did enjoy learning about Nancy’s sisters, who were a varied bunch, and seeing her interactions with them, but that was about the only part of Nancy’s story that I found entertaining.

In regard to the modern-day timeline, Katie’s story is meant to somewhat parallel Nancy’s experiences. However, Katie isn’t easy to connect with, either. She’s not a horrible person like Nancy, but there’s just something missing in her storyline, and I didn’t really think her narrative added much to the story overall. Simon is a strange fellow, and their relationship happens too quickly and isn’t very realistic. I kept flipping back thinking I’d missed some big emotional moment only to realize that those moments were happening off-the-page, which made their romance feel fake. On top of that, their search for Nancy’s lost manuscript is somewhat disjointed and ultimately unfulfilling. When I hear ‘searching for a lost manuscript,’ I think something along the lines of National Treasure or The DaVinci Code, and although I wasn’t really expecting the search to be as elaborate as all that, it was quite underwhelming. Furthermore, Felix, the bookstore proprietor who’s helping/hindering their investigation, comes across as weird rather than interesting despite his secrets, which were also revealed rather anticlimactically.

All in all, there’s really not much that I liked about this book. Normally when I finish a work of historical fiction based around real people, I want to find out more about their lives. That is definitely not the case with Nancy Mitford or her hoity-toity friends. Additionally, the dual timelines don’t add much to the story overall, and there’s just an awful lot of dialogue that makes the pacing off the story feel slow. I often found myself putting the book down with no real desire to finish.

Another book told in dual timelines. It’s about two women who are writers but seem to be having trouble writing their next book. There’s a lot of interesting characters in this book. I enjoyed the book for the most part, it did get a bit wordy at times.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the early copy

This book features two authors facing writers block in two different time periods with the same setting, a bookshop.

Nancy's timeline is in the war ridden 1940's. For whatever reason, it was hard for me to connect with this timeline. There were a ton of characters that I had a hard time keeping track of, especially when they had one or in some cases multiple nicknames. The storyline initially felt jumpy to me and I often wondered if I had missed something only to discover I hadn't when I looked back.

Katie's timeline was easier for me to read. It had extremely close parallels to Nancy's timeline and at times felt like I was just reading the same story. There were less characters in this timeline which made it a bit easier to follow.

What I felt was lacking the most was the secret implied by the title of this book. While the story offers a lot of dialogue, it comes up short in suspense. I turned the pages because I felt pressured to finish more than anything.

My thanks to #netgalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy of this book in return for an honest review. While I was very much interested in learning more about socialite/author Nancy Mitford and her patrician family, I was underwhelmed by the book. Although quirky, Ms. Mitford does not come off as a particularly likeable character, nor do Evelyn Waugh and some other members of her coterie. Her family certainly was full of diverse characters including fascists and Hitler afficionados.

Central to this dual-timeline book is the existence of a memoir supposedly written by Nancy Mitford and the role of refugee Lea, who turns out to be a fictional character from the author’s notes. The current-day characters, Katie and British Simon, are somewhat entertaining in their search for the supposed memoirs: Katie herself is an author in a slump and has an academic interest in Nancy Mitford, who also faced a writing slump before publishing The Pursuit of Love. Simon being Lea’s supposed grandson adds interest to the search for the memoirs in a London bookshop where Mitford worked in the 40’s.

Katie’s London frend Jojo’s son Clive is an amusing and technically savvy child who adds color ro the Katie saga. Yet I wondered if Katie’s story actually added a great deal.

While i did enjoy learning more about the Mitfords, felt the story could have been better by more emphasis on the Mitford family and less on the current-day story.

This was an interesting book to read. I kept feeling like I was missing something, missing the point of it. In reading the author's note - I realized Nancy Mitford wasn't just a character, but an actual writer. I'm guessing if I'd known that prior to reading, it would have made more sense. Overall good story - it just felt incomplete to me -- what happened with Simon? What did Felix do with the manuscript? It wrapped up quickly and I feel like there are some loose ends.

I can genuinely say I wasn’t bored by a single word in this book. Going back and forth between Katie and Nancy not only kept you on your toes, but seeing Felix’s involvement at the end had my eyes going wide.

4 stars.*

I've read and enjoyed all of Michelle Gable's works. I was particularly interested in The Bookseller's Secret when I learned that the subject was Nancy Mitford, one of the notorious Mitford sisters.

Gable's signature format-dual storylines across varying timelines-comes into play as expected in The Bookseller's Secret. One timeline features the fictionalized life of Nancy Mitford during the blitz years in London-when she worked at Heywood Hill, an actual bookshop. The story features real and fictional characters as Gable imagines them living. Mitford is an unusual protagonist-she was known to be snarky, perhaps even mean, but her biting wit is repurposed by Gable and somehow softened by the humanity she bestows upon her.

The current timeline is the story of a young American writer, struggling with self-doubt, who embarks upon a journey to unearth the supposed lost memoir of Nancy Mitford.

Cleverly and skillfully told, like all of her books. I enjoyed this one. But like all of these stories, I prefer the historical fiction timeline.

Highly recommended to my friends who are fans of Historical Fiction.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

This was my first book by this author, It was pretty enjoyable. I would give this book a 4.5 star rating! It was a pretty Quick and easy read!

Wow! I was not expecting this to be that good! I’ve read so many WW2 novels that I wasn’t sure if this would be unique enough but it was. Then I was worried about it going back and forth between different time zones and characters. Some authors obviously favour one time or character when they go back and forth between them. Once again, this was so well done!
I hadn’t really learned much about the Mitford family until this book came along so it was great to get to research and understand even more historical people. I was caught laughing so many times at the jokes made between characters surrounding Nancy’s family while also being disgusted at how such refined people could follow such horrific politics.

Review to come closer to my stop on this book tour


In 1942, London, Nancy Mitford is worried about more than air raids and German spies. Still recovering from a devastating loss, the once sparkling Bright Young Thing is estranged from her husband, her allowance has been cut, and she’s given up her writing career. On top of this, her five beautiful but infamous sisters continue making headlines with their controversial politics.

Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war. Between the shop’s brisk business and the literary salons she hosts for her eccentric friends, Nancy’s life seems on the upswing. But when a mysterious French officer insists that she has a story to tell, Nancy must decide if picking up the pen again and revealing all is worth the price she might be forced to pay.

Eighty years later, Heywood Hill is abuzz with the hunt for a lost wartime manuscript written by Nancy Mitford. For one woman desperately in need of a change, the search will reveal not only a new side to Nancy, but an even more surprising link between the past and present…

I am a huge fan of the story of Nancy Mitford and listened to a great BBC podcast episode about her, so I was intrigued with the storyline involving her. However, I just could not connect with the characters. From the very first few chapters, something felt missing and I still cannot put my finger on it. However, I kept going, determined to finish the book and I have to say that at times the story delivered, especially the parts related to Nancy, but as far as the other parts, well, I was just not a fan. I’m not saying this book isn’t good, perhaps just not my taste. I’d say it might be a good beachside-with-a-margarita read instead of a fireside-with-a-glass-of-wine read.

I am not usually a fan of historical fiction, but this one was interesting with its dual timeline and attention to sharp, witty dialogue, and focus on a real literary figure.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.