According to our in-house book reviewer, Dorothy Caldwell Minor, aka The Book Whisperer, award-winning and USA Today bestselling author Eliza Knight did her homework for The Mayfair Bookshop!

A little about Dorothy:

“I am an avid reader and also enjoy Indie and foreign movies. I retired from teaching English at Tulsa Community College after teaching as an adjunct first and then twenty-four years as a full-time faculty member. I was also involved in faculty development, planning and facilitating workshops for colleagues. I like technology and using technology to enhance learning. As an adjunct, I started a book club on campus, and it is still going strong thirty-one years later! I also belong to two other book clubs.I’ve included a picture from a Chautauqua Tea at TCC, complete with hat and brooch! I enjoy collecting vintage rhinestone brooches.”

Dorothy’s book club, Circle of Readers:

“We meet twice monthly. The first of the month, we all read a book and discuss it; the second time we meet, we discuss other books we’ve read. We enjoy inviting authors to join us! We have 20 members, and we are located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. We are currently reading When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann and enjoy reading fiction, historical fiction, memoir, nonfiction, YA.”

Why does Dorothy believe The Mayfair Bookshop to be an excellent choice for book club discussion? Read on:

Eliza Knight has an impressive body of work. I received a promotional copy of The Mayfair Bookshop and could hardly put the book down until I finished it. The book is “a novel of Nancy Mitford and the Pursuit of Happiness.” That description is apt. Knight has written a dual storyline with both parts set in London, primarily.

Lucy St. Clair, an American book curator who works for a firm locating rare books for clients, is sent to London to the Heywood Hill Bookstore in pursuit of books for a particular client.  She is thrilled to work at the Heywood Hills store because Nancy Mitford had worked there years before. Lucy is obsessed with finding information about Nancy Mitford, and particularly, a woman Nancy called Iris. Lucy’s mom, recently deceased, has purchased a copy of The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford at the Heywood Hill store years before. The inscription by Nancy to Iris has always intrigued Lucy and her mom. Lucy is bent upon solving the mystery even though her mother is gone.

In the dual part of the story, Nancy Mitford herself  becomes the narrator; along with Nancy’s observations and details of her life as England is on the cusp of WWII, enters WWII, and comes out of WWII, readers also discover additional insights through Nancy’s letters.

Knight has done her homework on the Mitfords. She reveals the warts in the family because Nancy’s mother and sisters Diana and Unity all fall under Hitler’s spell, dividing the family. Diana married to Bryan Guinness, heir to the Guinness fortune, but she falls in love with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. She divorces her husband and marries Mosley in Berlin in Joseph Goebbels’ home with Adolph Hitler as a guest. Nancy abhors the fact that her mother and two of her sisters have fallen under Hitler’s spell.

Knight also reveals Nancy’s personal heartbreaks of falling in love with the wrong man and of marrying the wrong man, Peter Rodd, or Prod as Nancy called him. She had a nickname for almost everyone. Nancy suffered other heartbreaks too, three miscarriages, never able to carry a child to term.

Readers suffer along with Nancy and her friends as the war swings into full gear with bombings in London and across Europe. Nancy does her part to help with the war effort from driving an ambulance (although not without incident) to caring for Jewish children who had been evacuated to safety in her family home.

Nancy finds friends everywhere she goes. She ends up working at Heywood Hill bookstore and leaves her mark there. Lucy loves that connection to Nancy. Both Lucy and Nancy do find happiness; readers will have to read the book to discover how that happens for both women.

As a book club leader, I found The Mayfair Bookshop an excellent choice for a book club discussion. Obviously, the war itself is a topic, marriage, divorce, loyalties, family connections, and happiness are all areas for discussion. Book lovers will enjoy all the extras found at the end of the book: “Meet Eliza Knight,” “Author’s Note,” “For the Love of Books,” “Bibliography of Nancy Mitford’s Amazing Works,” “Further Reading,” “Bibliography of Works Listed in the Novel,” and “Reading Group Guide.”

Eliza Knight is available to visit with book clubs via NovelNetwork.com.

Be sure to visit Dorothy’s website, Parkdalear’s Blog, and watch for her reviews of our NovelNetwork authors featured there, and shared right here at NovelNetwork.com.