I received an ARC for this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Michael is a bookseller who travels to discover rare old books and deliver them to patrons, to help complete and complement their collections. At first the style seems cinematic, like a screenplay with details of the set and driven by dialogue. Early observational passages with details of a restaurant meal, architecture, or a painting function as environmental portraiture: the connoisseur instinct notices things that others might overlook, recognizing and evaluating with professional discernment. When this turns to Michael's interactions with women, though, that evaluative view becomes more troubling. His casual treatment of relationships, sexual distractions, and inappropriate boundaries suggest someone whose romantic self-image as a cultured adventurer increasingly clashes with a sadder reality of professional and social irrelevance.

While I enjoyed aspects of the contemporary literary writing, the core plot, and the seeming nods to Nabokov, Calvino, and Updike, the sexual interludes, tangential tenth chapter, and abrupt conclusion made the last quarter of the book unsatisfying. I'd be interested to read more work by this author, though!

Thank you NetGalley for a preview read of this book.

"The internet was simultaneously the best and worst thing that had happened to antiquarian bookselling."

Peter Briscoe's book, Between Memory and Oblivion, is a story of a bookseller struggling with the shift of hard copy books shifting to digital versions and the fate of the hard copy books thereafter.

Briscoe's writing style is straight forward. The book is too long to be consider a short story but too short to be considered a novel; I'd call it more of a tale or novella. The plot is clear demonstrating the interconnected events however, the characters are not really developed. Additionally, I believe the main character, Michael Ashe, and his trysts would have been better inferred rather than unreserved. For this reason, the book should only be read by someone 18+. Finally, the historical information was accurate and was relevant to the plot.

I believe the idea behind the book is very relevant and the book itself would receive higher ratings if the plot and characters were more developed as well as a better balance to the story overall. I didn't feel there was anything drawing me into the story and therefore the justification for my rating. A quote from this book I wish the author would have considered, "...coped by going home and narrowing his gaze to a single book that he could lose himself in."

Thank you NetGalley! 3.5⭐️ Michael Ashe is a young rare book dealer whose business is in decline due to the surge in electronic capabilities. Passionate about his profession of safeguarding rare books into learning libraries, he’s horrified to find they may be destroyed to digitize them. When his new relationship is jeopardized by different viewpoints, he takes a stand. A fascinating novella that inserts history into the storyline. Felt that due to the very short offering, the lengthy interspersed historical information was a bit lengthy and unbalanced the book. The author notes run-on sentences but he himself fell into this pitfall himself several times. Good it felt unbalanced.