In Bookish People, a perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week--narrated by two very different women and punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner.

A writing professor haunted by mysteries in her past—and by moths, bridges, unfinished student stories, and her husband’s lover’s nightguard—returns to the scene of her parents’ deaths.

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.