As far as current authors go, it is hard to find someone that has found the same intersection of output and success that John Grisham has enjoyed.
The Arkansas native that would eventually call Mississippi home, embarks on his first book store tour in nearly 25 years to commemorate his 30th novel, Camino Island, his first of two books promised for this year. The 12-stop East Coast tour includes stops at Lemuria in Jackson and Square Books in Oxford.
The new book is described by Grisham as a heist thriller and is a departure from the legal thriller genre that Grisham has dominated since 1989’s A Time to Kill.
The plot centers on Mercer Mann, a young woman trying to make it as a novelist and former teacher, charged by a shadowy figure and large sum of cash to infiltrate a literary community that to try to find the man trying to fence a rare F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript stolen from a secure vault on the Princeton campus.
Lemuria owner, John Evans, said that within this exciting framework of a heist, Grisham explores the more intimate and tangible aspects of the modern world of first edition and rare book collecting and what a bookstore means today to not only the communities they exist in but to writers as well.
Evans dubs the book a “biblio-thriller” that is a window into the book world as a whole.
“It’s a thriller that centers around authors, booksellers, and manuscripts. The book is set in a bookstore that sells first editions and rare books. Camino Island features a lot of what book selling is about today—about what a bookstore means to its community and what booksellers mean to writers. It is a novel about the analog importance of reading, writing and book selling,” Evans said in an interview on the bookseller’s blog. “It is clear that John Grisham understands modern first edition collecting and the mentality of collectors. John also understands the book as an art object and what that means to a collector. When I finished the book, I wanted to explore John’s library and maybe see what manuscripts he had tucked away.”
Evans said he hopes this book and this tour will “emphasize the importance” of bookstores, physical books and why authors sign them.
Grisham will be at Lemuria in Jackson on Wednesday, June 21. The event will be strictly limited to 200 people. Tickets go on sale at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 16 at 9 a.m. and will only be available in the store.
Tickets are $32 and include a copy of the book. Book signing will start at 1 p.m. and go until 5 p.m.
Tickets also allow entrance to a book discussion that will be held at 5:30 p.m. in Lemuria’s annex in the Dotcom Building.
