Synopsis (from Goodreads):

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…

Review:

Although I already posted an excerpt from this book as part of a blog tour, I wanted to make sure and post a review as well.  I found The Bookseller's Secret, by Michelle Gable, to be a wonderful mix of historical and contemporary. We learn so much about an author who is becoming popular again, thanks to an recent adaptation of her most famous book, The Pursuit of Love.  Nancy Mitford's life was full of larger than life people, and events.  She and her family were the Kardashians of their day. The six sisters were mostly famous for being beautiful, and for courting controversy.  Several of them wrote books, with the most famous author amongst them being the oldest daughter, Nancy.

I really enjoyed learning about Nancy and her family, as well as the contemporary story of Katie, an American author looking for inspiration, as she looks into letters that Nancy wrote.  The historical details were rich, and the characters were well drawn in both time periods.  Along with the characters, the romances were wonderful.  The only thing I could have liked better, was if the pace was a bit quicker.  But, as author Michelle Gable says at one point, what's important is the journey, not the destination.

What I Liked:

Historical Details:

I really didn't know anything about Nancy Mitford's life, or the so-called Bright Young Things that she and her friends had been referred to in their youth.  Nancy's portion of the novel takes place in her middle years, after all the escapades of her twenties.  Her contemporaries were some of the most celebrated writers of the age, including, Evelyn Waugh, who wrote Brideshead Revisited.

But, aside from all the small details about life in England during WWII, what really caught my attention was how the author captured the attitudes of many of these elites.  I've always thought that, since England was at war with Germany, nearly all British people hated the Nazis.  I've heard rumors about the former King Edward VIII being a Nazi sympathizer.  But he seemed to be an outlier.  Apparently, that was not the case.  Many people of Nancy' social class admired Hitler, and didn't understand why his persecution of the Jews was such a big deal.  I found this quite shocking!  But, I think it rings true.  

Characters:

Nancy is the oldest of seven children, six of whom are female.  In her family, if you wanted to be noticed, you had to do something outrageous.  By the time we meet Nancy in middle age, one sister is in jail for being a fascist, another is an outspoken communist, and still another had been a mistress of Hitler!  While Nancy had written a few books, she hadn't really hit her stride yet as an author.  With such familial chaos, and a world at war, Nancy starts to finally understand that she wants to live life on her own terms.  That means finding love outside of her loveless marriage, and devoting the rest of her energy to writing.  This means bucking social expectations just as much as her infamous sisters do, which is terrifying.

Katie, the American in the modern part of the story, is also in transition.  She is reeling from a broken engagement, and can't find any ideas for her next book.  After one solid hit publication, she is under immense pressure to churn out a sequel.  But she bristles at the idea.  She has always been a fan of Nancy Mitford, so when she has the chance to read her letters, and solve a mystery surrounding her life, Katie jumps at the chance.  While Katie isn't faced with the same rigid social expectations that Nancy had in her day, she still has set the bar pretty high for herself.  And her family is almost as messed up as Nancy's was!  

Romances:

Both Nancy and Katie find love in unexpected places.  Nancy meets a French military man who, while not attractive in the traditional sense, is immensely charming and full of confidence.  Nancy has never had any qualms about having an affair.  But she finds such a connection with this man, that she realizes that her marriage is intolerable.  She has to fight her husband on getting a divorce, or at least letting her go.  It's a pretty brave struggle at a time when men considered their wives to be practically their property.

Katie, who has been with the same man since they were children, doesn't even know how to rebuild her life.  Given that everyone in her family worshipped her fiancé, it took a lot of guts for her to realize that they weren't really a good match, after all.  Then she meets an Englishman who is as obsessed with Nancy Mitford as she is.  He is trying to find a lost memoir that Nancy allegedly wrote during the war.  But why is he looking for it?  Their romance happens so quickly that Katie doesn't quite know if she can trust her feelings.  Also, if they stand any chance of a long term relationship, she would need to move to England.  How is this going to work?  Love will find a way. 

What I Was Mixed About:

Pacing:

As I said in my introduction, the book moves very slowly, particularly in the WWII portion.  While a lot of time passes over the course of the war, not much happens to Nancy herself.  To be fair, writing a novel is not an exciting, heart-racing endeavor.  It take time to gather ideas, write, and then polish a manuscript.  But, there are many long scenes with dialogue between Nancy and her writer friends, and little else occurring.  I wish there were more about her childhood and her wild sisters, the inspiration behind her most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love.

Rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release Date: August 17th, 2021

Author:  Michelle Gable

Publisher: Graydon House

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Page Length:  400 Pages

Source:  Publisher Blog Tour

Format:  E-Book

Recommendation:  If you are interested in Nancy Mitford, this book will whet your appetite for reading more about her.  A very enjoyable, but slow, read. 

I was so happy to be asked to participate in the Blog Tour for The Bookseller's Secret, by Michelle Gable!  

This novel has everything I love about books.  It creates a story with real-life people (in this case the author Nancy Mitford) amid a larger historical backdrop.   I am enjoying the settings, the characters, and the historical details too much to rush through this novel, so I have not finished it yet.  But I know if you love historical fiction, particularly novels set around WWII, then you are in for a treat!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

From New York Times bestselling author Michelle Gable comes a dual-narrative set at the famed Heywood Hill Bookshop in London about a struggling American writer on the hunt for a rumored lost manuscript written by the iconic Nancy Mitford—bookseller, spy, author, and aristocrat—during World War II.

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…

Here is an exclusive excerpt from the novel:

April 1946

Hotel de Bourgogne, Paris VII

There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes…and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves.

—Nancy Mitford,The Pursuit of Love

“Alors, racontez!” the Colonel said, and spun her beneath his arm.

Nancy had to duck, of course. The man was frightfully short. 

“Racontez! Racontez!”

She laughed, thinking of all the times the Colonel made this demand. Racontez! Tell me!

“Allô—allô,” he’d say across some crackling line. “Were you asleep?”

He might be in Paris, or Algiers, or another place he could not name. Weeks or months would pass and then a phone rang in London and set Nancy Mitford’s world straight again.

“Alors, racontez! Tell me everything!”

And she did.

The Colonel found Nancy’s stories comical, outrageous, unlike anything he’d ever known, his delight beginning first and foremost with the six Mitford girls, and their secret society. Nancy also had a brother, but he hardly counted at all.

“C’est pas vrai!” the Colonel would cry, with each new tale. “That cannot be true!”

“It all happened,” Nancy told him. “Every word. What do you expect with a Nazi, a Communist, and several Fascists, in one family tree?”

“C’est incroyable!”

But the Hon Society was the past, and this gilded Parisian hotel room was now, likewise Nancy’s beloved Colonel, presently reaching into the bucket of champagne. How had she gotten to this place? It was the impossible dream.

“Promise we can stay here forever,” Nancy said.

“Here or somewhere like it,” he answered with a grin.

Nancy’s heart bounced. Heavens, he was ever-so-ugly with his pock-marked face and receding hairline, the precise opposite of her strapping husband, a man so wholesome he might’ve leapt from the pages of a seedsman catalogue. But Nancy loved her Colonel with every part of herself, in particular the female, which represented another chief difference between the two men.

“You know, my friends are desperate to take a French lover,” Nancy said, and she tossed her gloves onto the bed. “All thanks to a fictional character from a book. Everyone is positively in love with Fabrice!”

“Bien sûr, as in real life,” the Colonel said as he popped the cork.

The champagne bubbled up the bottle’s neck, and dribbled onto his stubby hands.

“You’re such a wolf!” Nancy said. She heaved open the shutters and scanned the square below. “At last! A hotel with a view.”

Their room overlooked Le Palais Bourbon, home to l’Assemblée nationale, the two-hundred-year seat of the French government, minus the interlude during which it was occupied by the Luftwaffe. Mere months ago German propaganda hung from the building: DEUTSCHLAND SIEGT AN ALLEN FRONTEN. Germany is victorious on all fronts. But the banners were gone now, and France had been freed. Nancy was in Paris, just as she’d planned.

“This is heaven!” Nancy said. She peered over her shoulder and coquettishly kicked up a heel. “A luncheon party tomorrow? What do you think?”

“Okay, chéri, quoi que tu en dises,” the Colonel said, as she sauntered toward him.

“Whatever I want?” Nancy said. “I’ve been dying to hear those words! What about snails, chicken, and port salut? No more eating from tins for you. On that note, darling, you mustn’t worry about your job prospects. I know you’ll miss governing France but, goodness, we’ll have so much more free time!”

Nancy was proud of the work the Colonel had done as General de Gaulle’s chef du cabinet, but his resignation made life far more convenient. No longer would she have to wait around, or brook his maddeningly specific requests. I’ve got a heavy political day LET ME SEE—can you come at 2 minutes to 6?

“It’s really one of the best things that could’ve happened to us,” Nancy said. “Oh, darling, life will be pure bliss!” 

Nancy leaned forward and planted a kiss on the Colonel’s nose.

“On trinque?” he said, and lifted a glass.

Nancy raised hers to meet it.

“Santé!” he cheered.

Nancy rolled her eyes. “The French are so dull with their toasts. Who cares about my health? It’s wretched, most of the time. Cheers to novels, I’d say! Cheers to readers the world over!”

“À la femme auteur, Nancy Mitford!” The Colonel clinked her glass. “Vive la littérature!”

Excerpted from The Bookseller’s Secret by Michelle Gable, Copyright © 2021 by Michelle Gable Bilski. Published by Graydon House Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

MICHELLE GABLE is the New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment, I'll See You in Paris, The Book of Summer, and The Summer I Met Jack. She attended The College of William & Mary, where she majored in accounting, and spent twenty years working in finance before becoming a full-time writer. She grew up in San Diego and lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, with her husband and two daughters. Find her at michellegable.com or on Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest, @MGableWriter.

SOCIAL LINKS:

Author website: https://michellegable.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MGableWriter 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mgablewriter/

The Bookseller's Secret : A Novel of Nancy Mitford and WWII 

Michelle Gable

On Sale Date: August 17, 2021

9781525806469

Trade Paperback

$16.99 USD

400 pages