Ask a Bookseller: ‘The Red Notebook’ by Antoine Laurain

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

What would the contents of your purse or backpack say about you?

Bev Newton of Innisfree Bookshop in Meredith, N.H., recommends a novel about a Parisian bookseller who is so taken by the contents of an abandoned purse, he sets off on a quest to find its owner.

Newton calls it “the biggest little book you’ll read this year — a delightful little book."

Laurent Letellier discovers the purse, stripped by a mugger of all its valuable or identifying objects. Inside, he discovers a red notebook along with a key chain, a hieroglyph and perfume.

Newton says the notebook is full of fragmented “memories and wishes and fears,” adding that readers who wish they kept journals will take comfort in how much can be conveyed in dashed-off remarks.

Laurent, with help from his daughter, sets off on a quest to return the purse. But how to find a faceless, nameless woman in all of Paris?

The novel has been available in Europe for years, but it was recently translated and made available to the American market.