The Ginger Tree

"When I first moved to London in 1999, I started working at Daunt Books . It was a magical bookish dream come true, where I met some of my firmest friends and cut my teeth as bookseller. Every day was spent tidying, organising, unboxing, rearranging, locating and selling books of every kind, new and old. Readers were everywhere: behind the counter and as customers too. The Ginger Tree was recommended to me by a regular customer – in fact it was physically pressed into my hands with urgency and a command to read it immediately. I was transfixed instantly. This book is heartbreaking, leading the reader along with its protagonist to the brink of emotional calamity, all the while introducing a particular historical period in such sensitive depth and detail that you cannot help but be inspired to find out more. It might have been this book that solidified my interest in Japan too… It was a strange jump from this to new favourites by Haruki Murakami, or even Banana Yoshimoto, but the joy of working in a travel bookshop like Daunt Books in a pre-Google era, was the handy grouping of titles organised geographically. I still treasure my original and rather elegant cream-bound Eland edition of The Ginger Tree. Eland’s entire list is very carefully curated and beautifully produced too. So not only is The Ginger Tree a page-turner, a forgotten classic and a personal literary awakening, it marks for me a particular point in my own life when I was at the start of my bookselling and publishing career, living in London for the first time, slightly out of place, hopelessly romantic, and revelling in a whole new world of books inspired by places and historical events."