Confessions of a Bookseller
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Confessions of a Bookseller
Narrated by:
Peter Kenny
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Peter Kenny
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By:
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Shaun Bythell
About this listen
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms.
Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.
The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measure, Confessions of a Bookseller will reunite readers with the characters they've come to know and love.©2019 Shaun Bythell (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK
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Time has moved on for Shaun Bythell - sadly Anna, his American partner, has moved back to America but still visits, leaving Bythell at 45 with an increasingly damaged back from man-handling 1000s of books, and fearing a future as a cantankerous old curmudgeon. Despite, this, 'Confessions' is upbeat and brims with energy and sardonic humour - and wildly eccentric people, most of them customers.
Nicky, Bythell's Jehovah's Witness helper, is still in the shop (when she actually manages to get there) mis-pricing books and bringing 'treats' from Morrison's skip on Foody Friday - (chocolate donuts which the cat has slept on or which Nicky has licked , or both; squashed Welsh cakes or 'feta and spinach horrors') Emanuela, the 25 going on 85 year old Italian whom Bythell is housing and feeding in exchange for some help. Her mangling of the English language is one of the delights of the book, including her torrents of invective all tolerated by Bythell along with her massive appetite and her curious shaving habits.
There's a new wave of dreadful customers who haggle shamefully over the prices (do we ask for discounts in Lidls??) ; make wholly unreasonable requests (I've only got 80p, can I pay the other 20p on a credit card? This book is priced at £40, Can I have it for £20?);. They're sure that their bag of Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns is worth £100s rather than the re-cycle bin. They make no secret of the fact that after spending 2 hours, or many more, in the shop leaving books on the floor, they're off home to order the book they wanted on Amazon; they shelter from the rain in the shop, wet and un-buying; they ask supremely stupid questions and, almost worst of all, lean against the counter and tell lengthy mind-numbingly boring anecdotes. Bythell recounts all this with humour both bitter and funny.
We also learn a great deal about the stranglehold of Amazon and on-line book sales and share Bythell's weepingly frustrating experiences with the stipulations laid down by these massive companies. Festival time is hugely exhausting but stimulating with a house full of writers, necessitating frequent trips to the tip with crates of rubbish dripping stinking lobster juice into his vehicle. He drives many miles to check out boxes of books following up calls from people certain their books are super-valuable - one house he was told had 30,000 books, Bythell reckoned the total was closer to 60,000.No wonder his back suffers.
What makes the whole so special are Bythell's fishing trips and his appreciation of the countryside, landscape, waters and skies of Scotland. He can look up and watch a skein of honking geese across the sky; he revels in the luminous quality of the light. Above all he revels in the glory of books and treats us to what he's currently reading (Martin Amis) and plenty of quotations from classic and early books of all kinds. He's with the words his student helper Flo wrote on the blackboard outside the shop: "Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy books (which is basically the same thing)."
I preferred the narrator of Bythell's first book, but Peter Kenny is good and particularly good at presenting Emanuela. I loved it all.
Hooray for this sequel!
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Great fun, fabulous set of characters
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Nearly as good as The Archers!
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I think I love this just as much as I love the first one! Shaun is still probably one of the most hilarious people I’ve ever witnessed. Again, he tells us all about his customers and employees, and the funny things that they say and do, from some old favourites such as Sandy the Tattooed Pagan, Captain the shop cat, and of course the legend that is Nicky, to some new faces such as Bumbag Dave and Emmanuella (or Granny as she so affectionately becomes known). I don’t think there was any particular story that stood out for me, but everything that Emmanuella did or said was either downright entertaining or absolutely hilarious! I especially enjoyed every time she called Shaun a “shitty fucking bastard!” Shaun tells all of the stories with wit and sarcasm, which makes for another very hilarious read (or listen in my case). The narrator Peter Kenny wasn’t as dry as Robin Laing (narrator of The Diary of a Bookseller) but I still think he did a great job.
There is literally nothing that I don’t love about this book. I was entertained throughout.
This audiobook gets 5 out of 5 stars from me! I absolutely thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish and I can’t wait to see what comes next in the series. Surely this can’t be the end?
I would highly recommend this to anyone who loves nonfiction memoirs, entertaining stories, epistolary novels, books about books, sarcastic humour, and insights into the book trade.
Loved it!
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I've listened to the second book first by mistake, but it hasn't affected my enjoyment, I don't think it really matters if you listen to them the wrong way round. I'll listen to the first one in a week or so.
My only criticism is that the narrator speaks as if someone is holding a stopwatch up to him. But if I slowed it, it sounded a little odd. But it didn't spoil it. But that could just be me.
I loved this book!
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