Susan Coll was already an established novelist when she started working at Politics and Prose in 2011, and she promised the store’s owners that she wouldn’t write some kind of comic behind-the-scenes account of the beloved Connecticut Avenue shop. Oops. “I assured them that was not my intention,” says Coll, who ran the store’s programming and author events. “It truly was not! It just happened.”

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.

When dark clouds roll in, do you stay and weather the storm, or do you run toward blue skies?