Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Hazel Lam
Cover illustration Louisa Maggio
The Bookshop of Buried Pasts is a lusciously rich tale of mothering and forgiveness. Spanning two timeframes and places – the 1960s in Cambridgeshire and the recent past and present day in a NSW Southern Highlands village, the story takes us on an historical investigation of crimes, coercion and connection.
In the present day, young woman Lottie is thrust into the role of detective when she receives a note from her much beloved, now absent, grandmother, antiquarian bookshop owner, Phyllida. It extorts her to ‘Find Francis.’ She’s grappling with her own problems, somewhat skint, recently separated from a boyfriend, living of necessity with her mother, with whom the relationship is at best prickly, and then to top it off, there’s an unplanned pregnancy.
However, the imperative to search for the mysterious Francis becomes increasingly urgent, and Lottie enlists the aid of her longtime friend Roddy to help her in her search for information and then again when she travels to England in the quest for answers to more and more puzzling questions about her grandmother.
Having never known her father, Lottie finds in the quiet steady friendship of Roddy a reassuring anchor. On the other side of the generation scales, she finds an unexpected joy in the friendship she develops with Roddy’s teenage charge Sienna.
Meanwhile, the reader is also dipped into the dark deeds of the cast of characters from the Cambridgeshire village and large estate of the cruel and powerful lord of the manor, Edward. A twin antiquarian bookshop there seems to offer some of the answers in Lottie’s search for the truth that will help Phyllida.
The author skilfully unfolds this mystery and the reader wears Lottie’s shoes as she puzzles and speculates about connections between past and present, and about ways to make things right. At the same time, we are granted a level of omniscience as we fortuitously spend time in the past, witnessing the hurtful behaviour of the powerful and the ingenuity and camaraderie of the down-trodden.
The historical and ongoing mistreatment and vilification of women is the thread that strongly binds the different times and places in this family saga. The cruel wielding of power, physical and emotional, by scrupulous men over women takes many forms. In addition to the personal torments and sufferings they endure, our book women take on responsibility as mothers for the protection of their young.
In this story, our heroines also boast a heritage of healing and herbalism, and consequently that long old story of society’s condemnation of wise women as witches. There is a concomitant need for them to exercise caution and practise secrecy, for the strength to keep silent and to hide one’s true nature and power.
And so the story wends its way to the present day where all the components of buried pasts can find resolution, where the sadnesses of difference are overcome and where the secrets kept, the hurts and misunderstandings can be transformed through truth telling.
There is a bigger lesson here involving acknowledgement and forgiveness. ‘There is something in the experience of forgiveness, of being forgiven. It switches something on. Like a warm little candle, flickering in the blackness. The way ahead is still shadowy, but there is enough light to begin stepping forward.’ (page 359)
Further, in a story that delves into the blackest of human behaviours – including privilege, abuse of class and power, the wrongful bestowing of shame and guilt, domestic abuse, violence towards women and children, and sexual abuse – a restorative light is cast by acts of love, self-sacrifice and loyalty, and a kind of expiation or deliverance is granted.
In this story, we are ever conscious of the power of the landscape and of the long histories that form us. As the author carries us beyond the present time of the story’s end, we have a sense of the ‘sight’ with which Phyllida is gifted. Celtic mythology and history, and ‘the timeless rhythms of nature’ (page 369) are deeply etched in the people of this book, and its invocation to see each other and to treat each other well hangs insistently from the first word to the last.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for my review copy and to Sarah for a thoroughly enjoyable conversation about the darkness and light in this artfully crafted and superbly written mystery and hence of life.