Bookstore Girls

About

Riko is the forty-year-old assistant manager of a beloved Kichijoji bookstore — she worked her way up from part-time. Aki is twenty-seven, hired full-time through family connections, and constitutionally incapable of following rules. They clash constantly. Then word comes: the store will close in six months unless sales improve. The two women who can barely share a shift must now save the place they both, despite everything, love. Kei Aono writes workplace fiction with warmth and specificity — the daily rhythms of a bookstore, the politics of shelving, the particular bond between people who care about the same endangered thing. Bookstore Girls is a novel about two women who discover that the only thing harder than working with someone you can't stand is losing the place that made you who you are.