Just Finished Reading… The Left-Handed Booksellers Of London: Melbourne, Allen And Unwin, 2022

I have had this in ebook for some time, but forgot to read it. Then I did, because I absentmindedly bought a print copy of the sequel. And having read it, I’m kicking myself for leaving it this long.

The setting: England in 1983(the year Garth Nix first visited England).  But not quite our 1983. In the TV series The Professionals, Bodie and Doyle, are female, for starters, something the female fans of my acquaintance would hate - they love to drool over the male characters! 

More important, the booksellers of the title are an extended family of magic users, who actually do sell books because, as one of them says early in the novel when asked, they do have to make a living. But their two bookshops are used in their magic practice. They seem to be long-lived too, as one of the matriarchs of the family complains that another stole her “young man” a couple of centuries ago. They have arrangements with the London police, who don’t particularly like them, but accept that what they’re doing is necessary.

Eighteen year old Susan Arkshaw has been living with her mother outside of Bath. She doesn’t know who her father was, though she has a couple of items belonging to him, and her mother can’t or won’t tell her. 

But when she goes to  London to study art, she soon finds out that she is important to someone nasty, and the baddies are after her. Fortunately for her, she is helped by left-handed bookseller Merlin and his sister Vivien, a right hander. Left and right handedness isn’t regular handedness as we know it - it’s more a job description; the magical hand is silver and the left-handers do one thing, the right another.

While Susan’s father’s cigarette case and library card are being researched and tested by booksellers, she and her new friends have a number of adventures including kidnapping by beings from the Old World of which her father was a part. There is a probability that one of the booksellers is a traitor…

The novel is great fun. The characters are likeable. Merlin, who starts the novel by rescuing Susan from a criminal working for the Old World villains, enjoys shape shifting to female form and wearing nice clothes in either gender. He and Vivien are both working to protect Susan, sometimes from their own family, who have a tendency to kill off children of Old World beings in case these children might be inconvenient.  

Susan doesn’t need much rescuing, except from situations she has no way of knowing about. Sometimes she manages to rescue herself from those situations anyway. By the end of the novel she is beginning to be confident in her new magical powers.

The style of this book reminds me somewhat of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London series, so if you enjoy those novels you should enjoy this.

Available at all good bookshops and websites.