A canceled poet, a toddling tortoise, and the Schwarzenegger of vacuum cleaners turn a D.C. bookstore upside down in Susan Coll ’81’s sixth comic novel.

Susan Keselenko Coll ’81’s novels resist easy categorization. “My books are usually targeted more as women’s fiction, but there’s also a dark comic thread running through them that is a little more literary in a sense,” she says from her home in Washington, D.C. “I don’t mean that in a pretentious way. Readers either love it or they don’t.”

There’s a lot of love for Coll, who has built a loyal readership over the last 20 years with her acutely observed comedies of suburban life in the nation’s capital, including Rockville Pike (2005), Beach Week (2010), and The Stager (2014). Her 2007 novel, Acceptance, about an anxious mom trying to get her daughter into an Ivy League college, was adapted into a 2009 Lifetime movie starring Joan Cusack and Mae Whitman.

Coll’s latest novel, Bookish People (to be published by Harper Muse August 2), takes place in an independent D.C. bookstore over the course of a 10-day stretch of summer “punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner” (to quote the book’s press materials). It’s a milieu she knows well, having spent the better part of five years as events and programs director of Politics & Prose, the district’s premier independent bookstore.