Ever since I finished The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett (Text) I've been recommending it to everyone. It's just one of those novels.
A literary mystery, a time-travelling thriller, a love story: there is something to satisfy fans of most genres.
It's the mid-90s and antiquarian bookseller Peter Byerly is living a solitary life in a Welsh cottage following the death of his adored wife Amanda. Forcing himself to return to work he visits a shop in Hay-on-Wye where he comes across an 18th-century book on Shakespeare forgeries. He opens its pages to discover slipped inside a watercolour portrait of a woman with the face of his late wife. Shock is replaced by curiosity. The painting is at least a century old so it cannot possibly be Amanda yet it looks exactly like her. And so Peter becomes determined to solve the mystery.
This story has three strands. It moves back in time to Peter's student years in North Carolina and tells how the lonely young man becomes passionate about books and Amanda. Then we are taken further back still, to London in 1592, and the apparently unconnected tale of a rascally bookseller Bartholomew Harbottle drinking ale in a tavern with a group of great writers all intent on bad-mouthing "the upstart Shakespeare".