I have liked Salley Vickers ever since I read Miss Garnet’s Angel and I have blogged about Dancing Backwards (way back in 2010!). I borrowed this one from the library.
Here’s the blurb
A charmingly subversive novel about a library in 1950s England, by the acclaimed author of The Cleaner of Chartres
Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children’s librarian. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man – but it’s her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours’ son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.
How does the library alter the young children’s lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?
This was written in a contemporary style (it felt very 1950s to me). It is a story about books and reading, but also about relationships and betrayal.
A review from the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/03/mirror-shoulder-signal-curry-eating-reading-and-race-the-librarian-salley-vickersreviews-arifa-akbar
