New book caps off big year for bookstore owner
The novelist and bookseller Michelle Berry was anxiously awaiting a shipment of books in her store this week.
The books were texts for Trent University students; they needed them to complete an assignment.
When the deliveryman showed up at Hunter Street Books, Berry looked relieved. Soon the students would arrive - and get started on their work.
Nine professors at Trent send their students to her store to buy textbooks. At least one uses a novel of Berry’s – Interference – as a text.
Berry loves ordering books for students, who often buy their texts and a few other books too, while they’re in the store.
“The difference it makes for the store is incredible,” she said of the back-to-school rush. “It’s like Christmas here, when it’s September.”
Berry, 49, opened Hunter Street Books a year ago next month.
After the independent bookstore Titles closed on George St. in 2012, after 25 years in business, there was no more downtown bookstore selling current releases.
Berry said she missed Titles and thought the city missed it, too. Never mind that she had never owned a store before: she set up shop.
For a year, business at Hunter Street Books has been brisk: Trent students are customers, and so are retirees, book-club members and avid readers who come in and buy a pile of books once a month.
“There’s even poetry buyers – which is incredible,” Berry said. “Peterborough people are amazing readers – they have such great taste.”
On Oct. 5, Berry will celebrate a
year in business with a discount on select books – and in the early evening, she will launch her new novel.
The Prisoner and the Chaplain is the compelling story a death-row prisoner tells a chaplain in the last 12 hours before execution.
The chaplain has a crime in his past, too: although he wasn’t charged, the guilt weighs heavily on him and he cannot escape his own conscience even as he listens to the prisoner’s tale.
It’s not a book about death row, Berry said – it’s about guilt.
“It’s about whose guilt is more alive, at the moment,” she added.
The novel has a distinct structure: each chapter recounts one hour in the 12-hour countdown to the prisoner’s death by electrocution. The prisoner’s story gets increasingly tense - and intriguing - as the hours go by. Berry said she wrote The Prisoner
and the Chaplain in a rented studio in the Commerce Building, above St. Veronus, a few years ago (before she opened her store).
It’s her ninth book, and her sixth novel.
It will be available for sale on Oct. 5 at Hunter Street Books, where readers can also get a cookie from Black Honey bearing the store logo.
Everyone’s welcome. The store may be packed.
That’s quite a switch from writing the novel alone in her small studio up the street, she said.
“Writing is such a solitary act,” she said. Yet now, in the store, people come in and talk to her all the time about writing: hers, and the work of many other writers too. “It’s been an incredible year.” Hunter Street Books celebrates a year in business all day Oct. 5, with the launch for Berry’s The Prisoner
and the Chaplain at 6 p.m.