The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
The perfect book for anyone who's ever had their heart broken, anyone who's ever had their broken heart mended, and anyone who's ever visited a bookshop...
Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm - he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep - but Tom's been lonely since his wife Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers.
Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. When she asks him to move in, and help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy.
But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a battle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hillman (The Boy in the Green Suit) offers an uplifting exploration of how people rise above tragedy to find joy. It's 1968 in an Australian backwater town, and Tom Hope's wife, Trudy, has disappeared, only to return a year later, pregnant with another man's child. Tom grows to love the boy, Peter, but then Trudy abandons both when Peter is almost three, returning two years later to take her son from Tom and, shortly thereafter, send him divorce papers. After Hannah Babel who survived Auschwitz but lost her entire family, including her husband and young son, to the concentration camps comes to town, she hires Tom to fix up the bookstore she's set on running, and the two of them he, a calm workman, she an older, feisty intellectual each with their separate anguish, find common ground and marry. Then Peter, still a child, reappears in Tom's life, forcing Hannah to question whether she could allow herself to love another child, and Tom to potentially have to choose between his marriage and his love for the boy he considers a son. Hillman's novel is an impressive, riveting tale of how two disparate and well-drawn people recover from soul-wrenching grief and allow themselves to truly love again.
