The Bookshop of Slow Returns

About this book

The Bookshop of Slow Returns is a warm, luminous love story about books and the people they carry to one another across time, set in a secondhand bookshop in the heritage streets of George Town, Penang. Tan Yin Mei, forty four, is the third keeper of the shop her grandfather founded, and the keeper of its strangest treasure, the returns ledger, the sixty year record of every book that has ever been sold from the shop and then, slowly, sometimes after decades, come back, each return recorded with the story of where the book had been. The shop is beloved and struggling, the rents in a gentrifying George Town rising past what old paper can pay, and Yin is holding it together on love and stubbornness and the small faithful community of readers who have come there all their lives.