The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett

The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obession is a story that grabs your attention from the first chapter. I found out about this book while I was looking up different books on goodreads.com and because of the synopsis given on the website of the book I knew it was something I was going to enjoy reading. 

This tale is a story that takes place in 3 separate places in time, you start out the story in the year 1995 with broken hearted widower Peter Byerly. He has lost his wife Amanda to a brain tumor at a young age and he is trying to cope with his new reality. Peter packs up their home in North Carolina and moves to his cottage in the English Countryside and tries to get back into being a reputable antiquarian bookseller. He stops in a small bookstore in a nearby village and is take aback when flipping through an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries when old watercolor portrait of his wife falls out of one of the pages.  

This event starts Peter on a trail that leads him to answers to the questions he had and has the potential to make him quite famous. Has he really found the proof that Shakespeare did in fact write his own plays? And was not just a pen name for another source, such as Christopher Marlow? 

I enjoyed this book because it involved a few passions of mine, books and theater. As a Theater major in college the story and history of Shakespeare's identity has always and still does intrigue me. I like the fact that there is mystery surrounding a playwright  a play around the writer. It adds some mystery and it is just so fun to think that things are not always what they seem, but sometimes they are. 

Like in The Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness this book is surrounded by actual literary facts, mixed with fictional characters and as I have stated before that makes a book highly enjoyable for me. It is like a history lesson within a captivating story. If my previous History teachers could teach history using stories like this, I would have learned a heck of a lot more, and actually paid attention in class! 

I definitely encourage you to check this out from your local Library, head over to Barnes and Noble, or to download it onto your e-reader as soon as you can. This is one book I know I will be purchasing to add to my collection of books on my shelves because I know I am going to want to read this again.

Happy Reading!