Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore: A Novel
Matthew Sullivan
Jun 2017 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Madeleine Maby
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9 hr
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
When a beloved bookstore patron dies by suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this award-winning debut novel that is at once “shocking, charming, [and] thrilling” (Associated Press).
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 goes 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? As she follows the trail of puzzles Joey left behind, she uncovers long-buried secrets about her dark childhood, estranged family, and a violent crime that still casts shadows decades later.
With “ddball characters and [a] layered plot” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is literary mystery and psychological thriller perfect for book lovers, book clubs, and fans of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, and Jess Walter.
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 goes 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? As she follows the trail of puzzles Joey left behind, she uncovers long-buried secrets about her dark childhood, estranged family, and a violent crime that still casts shadows decades later.
With “ddball characters and [a] layered plot” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is literary mystery and psychological thriller perfect for book lovers, book clubs, and fans of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, and Jess Walter.
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About the author
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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