Discover the brand new heart-warming romance from bestselling author, Rebecca Raisin. Read on to learn more about the book from the author herself.
A bundle of mysterious letters. A trip to Venice. A journey she’ll never forget.
Bookshops are magical places. Novels are a portal to many other worlds that we can escape to as soon as we flip open the cover and settle in to read. I’ve always been a bookworm, and love writing about literary places.
In my latest novel, my central character Luna finds herself staring at a bookshop weathered by the elements, almost forgotten down a quiet Venetian lane. It has an abandoned air to it, as if the owner got up one day and left. That is, until she sees the many bookshop cats through the streaky windows.
The Little Venice Bookshop all at once becomes alive to her, as so often second-hand bookshops do. They hum with the promise of special tomes one might find. The air is perfumed vanilla with the scent of well-thumbed books that have been on mysterious journeys and have now found their way to a dusty forgotten bookshop on the canals of Venice.
In my novel the city of Venice is almost a character unto itself. It pulses with life, with the bustle of tourists, coming in by water taxi, by cruise ship. Italian men playing bocce. Nonnas hand-rolling pasta and cackling inside tiny shops down cobblestoned streets. Lovers kissing by the Rialto bridge, sunlight giving them halos as if their love is truly divine. Gondoliers singing operatically as they swish along, fresh washing strung along balconies flipping in the breeze as an accompaniment. The city has a musicality to it; it’s theatrical, alive with possibilities.
Writing about a place as vibrant as Venice, set in a bookshop with cheeky cats named after literary greats, and focusing on a mystery my free-spirited heroine Luna needs to solve was great fun, and I connected to this story deeply.
I would love to hear what you think about it!
The Little Venice Bookshop is out now. If you want to hear more about Rebecca’s books, sign-up to her newsletter here.
