This book is a celebration of publishing industry and those who make stories available to the readers.

Por la mañana, cuando llego a la librería, me paro un momento delante del escaloncito que hay ante la puerta para contemplar el local que me pertenece. En ocasiones me quedo allí inmóvil tanto tiempo que el camarero del café de al lado se alarma y me pregunta si va todo bien. Pues claro que va todo bien: los libros están colocados por orden alfabético, las obras de arte colgadas justo encima, y aquí solo tienen derecho de ciudadanía la literatura, el arte y la amistad.”] Kaouther Adimi, (born 1986 Algiers) is a writer, graduate in modern literature and human resources management. She works today in Paris, where she has lived since 2009.Readers can fill much in, as the text does provide lots of keywords, people, and moments that readers can free-associate from, and as such it forms a good sort of foundation, but all in all it still feels rather thin. There are still books there when Ryad arrives, but he has little interest in them; still, he gets to know Abdallah and some of the locals, making for a nice small slice of contemporary life in Algiers -- and Ryad does get some sense of what is lost here. Those parts narrated by the omniscient group- we are a bigger sort of summing-up -- effective as such, and a useful complement to the other sections, but also somewhat limited.

A Bookshop in Algiers follows two timelines as we see the creation and then ruin of a bookshop that once felt like the heart of so many bibliophiles. Going between the 1930’s-1960’s and present day, we see two different characters and their relationships with books, and how books change them. All along, the Algerian struggle against the French loom over much of what happens -- and then more recent domestic struggles.Charlot's bookshop is named after a novel that he admires Les Vraies Richesses: (1937) by Jean Giono (1895-1970). Adimi adds many cameo appearances by young writers of the time that Charlot was to publish, notably Albert Camus (1913-1960) with his first works. She builds a complete timeline of Charlot's life through a series of diary entries that take us through all of the ups and downs of his career. After the war, however, Charlot heads for the big times, setting up his (publishing) shop in Paris. While she was studying in the Alger university, she entered a writing contest organized by the French Institute, for the young writers in Muret (Haute-Garonne). The short story she submitted held the attention of the jury who published it in a collection alongside the other laureates' productions. Thanks to this contest, she was invited to Muret then Toulouse and finally Paris, where she met with les éditions Barzakh.