The Lost Bookshop
The Lost Bookshop
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Evie Woods on The Lost Bookshop
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
An image that refused to leaveThe novel did not begin with a theme or an argument. It began with a single image that lodged itself in Woods’s imagination and stayed there until she built a book around it.
It started with a very, very strong image that I had in my head of a girl escaping from an abusive convent and ending up in a mysterious bookshop where she learns to read. I just had that image stuck in my head for ages and ages. [paraphrased from audio]
The timing of the book’s conception matters as much as its content. Woods had just watched a small indie publisher fold during Covid, leaving her with a decade of rejection behind her and no publisher in front of her. She wrote the novel under a private ultimatum.
That’s when I began writing The Lost Bookshop and decided that if I couldn’t find an agent or a publisher, I would self-publish. I submitted to around 25 agents and heard back from three. All rejections.
The feminist argument built into the dual timeline was not incidental. Woods structured the novel so that the same patterns of erasure play out a century apart, and she named the genre that framework belongs to on her own book club page.
Magical feminism is one of the genres explored in this story, to challenge societal norms and give women agency and empowerment.
How she wrote it
Where the timelines met and the tree grewThe hinge connecting the two timelines is not a character or a place but a reading experience: one character, set in the present, encounters a text whose real subject she cannot yet see. Woods built the dramatic irony of the whole novel into that gap.
For this book, I had the idea that one character was reading the other’s story, but she didn’t know it was the other character. She thought she was reading fiction, but she was reading a version of the truth. [paraphrased from audio]
Managing two timelines and three points of view is a structural problem many writers find exhausting. For Woods it operates the other way.
It’s always a challenge writing dual timelines, but it’s something I relish. Whatever way my brain works, I find the complex structure of multi-POVs kind of thrilling, and I think it brings so much colour and vibrancy to the story.
The historical strand required research into 1920s London, and one discovery there pulled the plot in a direction Woods had not originally planned. Accounts of Irish girls sent to convents where they were forced to work were not background texture; they became the engine of the 1920s storyline.
I didn’t want it to feel too dusty and academic. I wanted it to feel really immediate and lively. [paraphrased from audio]
The tree whose roots push through Martha’s basement walls is not a piece of atmosphere invented on a second draft. Woods named it alongside the hawthorn in an earlier novel as a deliberate symbolic choice, one she connects directly to growing up on Ireland’s West Coast.
I tend to use symbolism in my work, such as the tree in The Lost Bookshop and the hawthorn in The Story Collector.
She traces that instinct to geography rather than technique.
When asked about the source of the novel’s folkloric texture, Woods points to Galway rather than to any literary tradition she consciously studied.
Growing up in Ireland, especially the west, I think it’s impossible not to be influenced by folklore!
The personal thread
The night before publicationThe book went out into the world carrying the full weight of what had happened before it existed. On the eve of publication Woods wrote a post on her blog that named what the years of rejection had cost and what writing through them had produced.
This book has my heart and soul inside of it, the sun, moon and stars. The rejection, the pain, the hurting; as well as the hope, love and wisdom I’ve gained.
After the book found its audience, readers began writing to Woods directly. The volume and intimacy of those emails was something she had not anticipated, even after ten years of wanting exactly this kind of connection.
I was not prepared for the amount of emails that I would receive from all over the world with people telling me the life situation they were in when they were reading my book, how they came across the book, what it had meant to them… I will never get over that.
On craft choices
A book as a vessel, not just a propThe rare Emily Brontë manuscript at the center of the plot is not simply a MacGuffin that moves three characters toward one another. Woods had a specific theory of what a physical book can do across time, and she built the novel’s architecture around it.
I just love the idea of using the book itself as a character almost — a vessel that can carry messages through time. It can be a hidden object, and it can contain the secret of the story. [paraphrased from audio]
The question of whether disruption is deviation or direction runs through all three characters in the novel. Woods traced that question back to the structural problem she had to solve at the drafting stage: how do you build narrative momentum when disruption keeps interrupting the forward path?
When things go wrong, we automatically assume it’s a mistake, a deviation from our true path. But maybe they are the path. Maybe these deviations are guiding you to a place that’s even better than the one you had intended.
The matriarchal lineage connecting Emily Brontë, Sylvia Beach (the Paris bookseller who first published James Joyce), and the fictional Opaline is not a loose thematic gesture. Woods names it as a deliberate structural choice, a chain she wanted readers to trace through the book.
Emily Brontë, Sylvia Beach and Opaline were all women who lived beyond the conventions of their time. In this story, this matriarchal lineage is passed down through books.
What she wants us to sit with
Writing from an authentic placeWoods reads her own reviews, and a pattern in them told her something about what had worked. Readers were not responding to the book as a clever genre exercise; they were responding as though the novel had been addressed to them personally.
One thing that has struck me from so many reader reviews (yes, I read them) is that the reader believes the book was written especially for them. That kind of connection with the story and the characters is really only possible when you write from an authentic place.
On her own website, Woods gives the novel’s purpose in a single line that sidesteps plot and lands on feeling. The description is spare by design: she leaves the question of how healing arrives to the reader’s own encounter with the three characters.
Ultimately, The Lost Bookshop is a hopeful story of healing and finding your path in life.