The House of Marvellous Books

By Fiona Vigo Marshall

Tucked away in a near-derelict library in the centre of London, The House of Marvellous Books is a publishing house on the brink of financial disaster. With assistant Ursula asleep at her desk, head publisher Gerard going health and safety mad, and chief editor Drusilla focused on finding a supposedly priceless but famously missing manuscript, there is hardly anyone left to steer the ship.

Young Mortimer Blakeley-Smith, junior editor, charts the descent of the House in his logbook as it lurches from one failure to the next. Will mysterious Russian buyers, lurking in the wings, finally sink the ship? Or will Drusilla find the legendary Daybreak Manuscript and save the day?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fairlight Books
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914148101

Fiona Vigo Marshall

Fiona Vigo Marshall was born in London and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her debut novel Find Me Falling, published by Fairlight Books in 2019, was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2020. The House of Marvellous Books is her second novel. Her short stories and poems have been nominated for numerous awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, which she won in 2016 with her short story 'The Street of Baths'. Her work has appeared in Prospect, Ambit, The Royal Society of Literature Review, Orbis International Literary Journal, and The London Journal of Fiction.

Reviews for The House of Marvellous Books

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The House of Marvellous Books by Fiona Vigo Marshall is an unusual yet ultimately satisfying read. For all of its oddities this is still a book about community and, what seals the deal for me, books.As is the case with most books that don't try to be like other books, it takes a few pages to get into both the flow of the writing and the world of the work. I can't really blame those readers who choose not to make the kind of commitment to push through those initial questions they have, but I am glad I did so. I came to care about the characters, the building itself, and the books both written and pondered.About the characters. This is not really a work that delves into the area of being a character study or of even necessarily fully fleshing out the secondary characters. But we do learn enough about them to form opinions, to care about the things that they care about. Not in the same way we care, let's say, for our best friends or family. More like the way we care about our co-workers or our neighbors, they are more than strangers but not quite in our inner circle. While I love deep character studies, I am also fine with knowing characters the way I know most people in my world.Which brings me to the building and library. To the extent that this might be a character study it is of the building and its history, its quirks, and its possible future. By extension the publishing company is a part of this "character" for me. Thanks to the prose I came to see the building as an almost sentient being and cared as much for it as any character.While I would eagerly recommend this to many of my friends there are a few I would probably not even mention it to. The difference, I think, is whether the reader likes to read novels that are different in more than one way. This has unusual characters, it also has a plotline that is largely to support the excursion into this little world, and it uses a diary format which is not quite the norm even if it also isn't rare. If a reader likes the idea of coming to terms with all of these things, they will be rewarded with some humor, some thoughtful ideas, and a visit to a unique building/library.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.