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  1. Books
  2. Fiction
  3. Contemporary fiction

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3.7(9)

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore : A Novel

When a bookshop patron dies by suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this "shocking, charming, thrilling" (Associated Press) and award-winning debut novel.

Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she leads a meticulously ordered existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day browsing the overwhelmed stacks.

But when a young BookFrog, Joey Molina, hangs himself in one of the upper rooms of the store, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Inside one of Joey’s pockets is a photograph of Lydia as a little girl. And when she flips through some of his books, she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. The more she puzzles over them, the more they seem to contain a hidden message for her about his final days. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia?

With "oddball characters and [a] layered plot" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is “a smart, twisty crime novel set in a world that booklovers will adore” (Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins).


Author:

  • Matthew Sullivan

Narrator:

  • Madeleine Maby

Format:

  • Audiobook
  • E-book

Duration:

  • 9 h 0 min
  • 223 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Fiction
  • Contemporary fiction

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  • 2 books

    Matthew Sullivan

    Matthew Sullivan is the author of the novel Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, which was an IndieNext pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist, and winner of the Colorado Book Award. His writing has appeared inThe New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Spokesman-Review, Sou'wester and elsewhere, and his stories have been awarded the Florida Review Editor's Prize and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He grew up in a family of eight raucous kids in Aurora, Colorado, and received his BA from the University of San Francisco and his MFA from the University of Idaho. After working as a bookseller at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he spent twenty years as a tenured instructor teaching writing, literature, and film at a rural HSI community college in the high desert of central Washington State. He is married to a librarian and now lives in Anacortes, on Fidalgo Island in the Northwest corner of Washington. His new stand-alone mystery novel, Midnight in the Orchard by the Lake, is forthcoming from HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.

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Excellent4.3 out of 5