The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

He's a bachelor who lives in an apartment and has a bookstore on a barge on the river.  He had a girl and lost her and now he puts his life into books.  He matches books with people.  If you need to laugh or cry, he'll find one that does that for you.  If you're not sure where you're going in life, he has books for that, too.  If you're trying to figure out something new, he's sure to have an instructional book on his shelves.  He even has some erotic books for those who need it.  It sounds like a very interesting bookshop to me.  I wonder what kind of book he would think I would need?

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review (thank you).  It has been published, so you can get a copy at your local bookstore now.

Reading this I learned a bit about Paris and the waterways there and a bit of about the morals of the French.  It appears they more at ease about sex there.  Or maybe it's just because I was raised Catholic, who knows?  Finding out the woman he loved was marrying another man and would like him to come visit them at the vineyards where they lived seemed a bit strange to me.  How can you have a man you love in Paris for when you visit there and marry and live with another man when you go home?

If you ignore that little hump in the road and keep reading, you'll learn a bit more about life.  When he finds his neighbor in the apartment across the hall has been left by her husband and he's taken all the furniture, he remembers he had a table he could give her.  She finds a letter in the table drawer and he's afraid to read it.  It's from the woman who left him.  She helps him find the courage to read it, and he decides to go find his old love.  He sets the barge free and heads out. He seems to gather strays on his way, meets a lot of new people, and even finds a place to stay for a while.  He also realizes his love died and he works at coming to peace with that.  

This was an interesting journey through a strange land for me.  The ending made the book.  Why don't you take the barge down the river with Perdu?