The Origin of Foyles?

[mtvessel]

Oct 2022
The Left Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix – Gollancz, 2020
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Not a lot to say about this one as it hasn’t lingered in my mind. It's a young adult fantasy set in an alternative 80s London, where Susan Arkshaw, daughter of a loving but vague and useless mother, is looking for the father whom she has never met. She visits her uncle Frank Thringley, a minor crime lord, only to discover that he has just been killed by a flamboyant young man called Merlin because he was a sipper, a type of vampire, who had gone bad. This is the introduction to the Susan Cooper-ish dark forces that are trying to break through into the modern world, who are opposed by an organisation of not-quite-human warriors (left-handed) and scholars (right-handed) that has decided to run a set of bookshops as a cover. It’s a nice conceit but, like so many young adult novels, substitutes pacy plotting for plausible characterisation.