The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is Gabrielle Zevin's 2014 novel, the literary commercial breakout that established Zevin's career almost a decade before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow would push her to a much larger audience. The structural premise is the fictional Alice Island, a small coastal Massachusetts island where A. J. Fikry runs Island Books out of a converted Victorian. After A. J.'s wife dies in a car accident and his life narrows to the bookstore alone, a sales rep from Knightley Press named Amelia Loman keeps coming back to pitch him books, and a two-year-old named Maya is left in the bookstore with a note from her young mother asking that A. J. raise her.

Zevin's structural method is the patient one-book-per-chapter construction that gives the novel its title; each chapter opens with one of A. J.'s own book recommendations to Maya (a contemporary short story, a novel, a poetry collection), each of which functions as a thematic commentary on the chapter that follows. The Maya chapters across the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific kind of adoptive father-and-young-daughter relationship. The Amelia Loman romance plot operates as the structural counterpoint and earns the late-novel emotional payoff. The Island Books chapters are the structural emotional center of the novel and are deliberately written to operate as a love letter to independent bookselling as a specific way of being in the world.

Recommended for literary commercial readers, for the broader independent-bookstore-loving audience, and as the right Zevin entry point for readers coming to her work from any direction. Compare to Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, Penelope Lively's Heat Wave, and the broader contemporary bookstore-novel subgenre. The Scott Brick audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.