When the bookstore originally opened, my sister Linda presented me with a housewarming gift: appropriately, it was a book.
A hardback copy of the just-released Whitethorn Woods by Irish author Maeve Binchy. I’d already sold a number of her titles in my capacity as a bookstore clerk previous to opening McHuston Booksellers. I knew she was popular.
She was also a great writer, as I learned after cracking open Linda’s gift. (That’s figurative speaking there – I would never crack a book spine!) Coupled with my experience traveling Ireland with my daughter and mother just a few years before, I greatly enjoyed Binchy’s story of Irish progress versus tradition.
“We have lost a national treasure,” the Irish Prime Minister Edna Kenny said today, following word that Maeve Binchy died Monday at age 72.
The author was in a Dublin hospital with her beloved husband at her side after battling a brief illness. Many of her 16 novels were dedicated to her husband.
Her worldwide sales topped forty million books, which included her novels, four collections of short stories, a novella, and a play. Much of her work was set in her native Ireland – both Dublin and rural communities.
I thanked my sister for the book, but I’m not sure I made her understand how much I truly enjoyed it. It was not a title I would have purchased for myself, having incorrectly assumed that Binchy was strictly a romance writer. I have nothing against the genre and have read my share, and probably more – as people ask questions about authors and I feel I need to have some experience.
The rich characters in her books are as vivid as the Irish landscape in which she places them.
A few minutes ago, a copy was placed on the sales counter along with a couple of other books.
“I was sorry to hear she passed away,” I said. It happens regularly that the death of an author spurs sales of the books.
“She died?” asked my customer.
“Sorry,” I replied. “I figured that’s why you were buying the book.”
It turns out, the customer was simply a fan who had read a number of Maeve Binchy titles. It was appropriate that the one she bought this afternoon was Light a Penny Candle, the author’s first novel.