After a couple of heavier reads in the first couple of weeks of this year – one being heavy in terms of it being a classical novel, Jane Eyre, and the other being heavy due to it being 880 pages long, A Clash of Kings – I was keen for something a bit lighter when I returned to my bookcase for another choice.

I’m very pleased I picked Veronica Henry’s How to Find Love in a Bookshop, it was just what I was looking for.

It’s so easy to sink into the pages of this book, and suddenly find yourself having read the day away. In fact, I finished it in two days overall, having got completely absorbed in the tale.

It all begins with the unfortunate death of the owner of an independent bookshop, whose daughter takes on the duties of running the shop, and begins to find out just how much her father, and the shop, had meant to the people in the village.

Apart from it being a pipe-dream of mine to own a little indie bookshop myself, I also found myself drawn to the characters in this novel. I think we all have a little bit of Emilia, Thomasina, and Sarah in us, and this is why I just couldn’t put it down. You find yourself willing everything to work out, even when it looks like all hope is lost, and it’s a real feel-good easy read novel.

I picked up this book as part of a ‘buy one get one half price’ offer at my local bookshop, and will admit I’d never heard of Veronica Henry before. But now, I’m interested to read more of her work and find more endearing characters between the pages.