The Bookshop of Unfinished Journeys

The classics are not dead. They are being simplified to death. Martin Rothery enters a bookshop to get out of the rain. Inside, he finds an elderly bookseller called Mr Vale, a cat with an uncertain relationship to distance, and a copy of The Odyssey that is beginning to lose something more important than its words. The great stories are being reduced. Odysseus is becoming a hero who perseveres. Penelope is becoming a wife who waits. Complex lives are being compressed into neat lessons, useful labels and approved meanings. And when enough of a story is removed, the world inside it begins to change. Martin and Vale are pulled through the books themselves, encountering the people who existed before centuries of interpretation made them simpler. Heroes prove inconvenient. Monsters acquire context. Lessons refuse to stay learned. And the Bookshop has problems of its own. Something is correcting the stories. What begins as a journey through some of literature's most familiar worlds becomes a much stranger question about identity, meaning, choice and what happens when a human life is reduced to the part that is easiest to explain. Funny, unsettling and unexpectedly personal, The Bookshop of Unfinished Journeys is a literary fantasy about old stories, unfinished people, and everything that disappears when we become too certain what either of them means.