The Lost Pages Bookstore Grand Opening

Tomorrow, August 1, 2023, is the birthday for what I feel is the best novel I’ve ever written. Sure, writers say that about all their newest books, but in this case I really mean it.

This novel was begun in 2018, a little while before my divorce was finalized. By the end of that year, I was divorced, unemployed, and had closed on a house the day after I lost my job. I spiraled into a deep depression and stopped writing.

I hated myself. I hated what I had done to my marriage, to my kids, and to my career. The brakes were off and I was in a downward spiral, going faster and faster, waiting for the crash. After 18 months of not writing anything, I told myself I either had to go back to it, or declare I was no longer a writer. I chose the project that was nearest completion, the romance novel Sunset written under my Adri Amanti pseudonym.

It was hard. I’d produce maybe a page a day at first. Then a little more and a little more, until finally the story took off again, though a romance was most definitely NOT what I felt like writing. I finished that book, and turned my attention back to The Lost Pages Bookstore.

A good bit of this book is autobiographical. You should understand that every novel is autobiographical in some way, large or small. Sometimes it’s a story built around a single incident in the author’s life. Sometimes more. This novel switches some things out, but there is a lot of truth in it. There are even some real things that happened.

What Donnie learns in the course of the story is that truth depends on one’s perspective. He believes he is the monster his ex-wife said he is, and that’s why he retreated to a speck on the map and hides who he used to be. He believes his new neighbors think him strange and avoid him. His uninvited guests, Mike and Josey, also are dealing with false perceptions of themselves. It’s only when the three of them come together that they can face who they are and learn that mistakes do not define a person any more than an outsider’s perspective does.

There’s also some wish fulfillment in the story, and only part of that is owning my own little bookshop in a small town.

As I was writing the book, I thought about pitch lines. Not my strong suit, by any means, but I kept coming back to Wallace Stegner meets Phaedra Patrick. Stegner because I’ve truly come to appreciate stories about ordinary people living quiet lives, and Patrick because so many of her novels are about people getting second chances. I can’t say if The Lost Pages Bookstore has a happy ending, but I think it has the ending it had to have.

I’ve rambled on enough. I hope you’ll read the book. I hope you’ll like it, and maybe leave a review.

You can order it by clicking here.