Bookish

Adapted from the upcoming major U&alibi series created by Mark Gatiss

Matthew Sweet’s novelisation of Bookish is based on a brand new six-part TV series coming to U&alibi this summer, set in post-war London in 1946, about an enigmatic independent bookshop owner who helps the local police solve crimes.

Gabriel Book is an erudite and unconventional London bookseller married to Trottie, the owner of the wallpaper shop next door. He is also a sleuth who uses the chaotic riches of his stock to crack the puzzling cases that come his way.

He does not work alone. Book’s shop is a magnet for waifs and strays - one of whom is an aspiring writer called Nora. Unlike the TV series, the novel will re-tell the crime stories from Nora’s perspective.

Clever, endearing and entertaining, Bookish is a warm-hearted and unexpected mystery, about books, murder and the secrets we all keep.

Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of Bookish. He presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018). His 25 years of television and radio programmes include The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist. His film Liberation Radio screened in the 2021 London Film Festival and at the Manzi gallery in Hanoi. In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec. His crime novel The New Forest Murders (Simon and Schuster) and his biography The Great Dictator: The Life of Barbara Cartland (Hodder) are forthcoming.