Bookworm Nina Hill lives and breaths books, she even works at a bookstore and runs their book clubs. She also likes her life to run smoothly and plans her day to the second. She doesn’t like change, people she doesn’t know, nor being beat in her weekly quiz team meetings.

Then she meets Tom from a rival quiz team and he makes her heart all fluttery, but he’s not bookish and she couldn’t date someone who isn’t into books, could she?

She also has just found out that the father she never knew or wanted to know about has died and she is mentioned in his will. Sound okay so far, until she learns he was married three times and she has numerous siblings, nieces, nephews, and step-mums. This is not how she planned her future!

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is a warm, amusing, insightful novel that I completely loved. Nina is such an amazing character, if a little different, but different is good. She lives alone, except for her cat Phil and likes being alone. She prefers the company of books to humans – I think we all know that one at some point!! She loves facts, decent wine (cheap stuff just won’t do), movies, and quizzing.

Nina has a small group of friends and likes to keep it that way. She’s not one for small talk or flirting apparently, but suddenly liking the company of her arch-nemesis Tom and finding out she has a huge family is terrifying.

The book is extremely well written. You can feel all of Nina’s emotions radiate off the page. You will also giggle along at her view on life, it certainly gives you that feel-good factor. It was lovely to see Nina blossom as the book progressed and for her character to evolve along with her current situation. She felt very realistic which is a credit to author Abbi Waxman’s writing skills.

This is a must-read for anyone who is bookish. It was great to see an introvert take centre stage of a storyline and not be there to make up the numbers. It is also filled with plenty of facts that I kept on sharing with my husband who I think switched off after a while!

Light, entertaining, and enjoyable the whole way through. This was a book I didn’t want to end. I will miss quirky, sarcastic Nina.

Abbi Waxman was born in England in 1970, the oldest child of two copywriters who never should have been together in the first place. Once her father ran off to buy cigarettes and never came back, her mother began a highly successful career writing crime fiction. She encouraged Abbi and her sister Emily to read anything and everything they could pull down from the shelves, and they did. Naturally lazy and disinclined to dress up, Abbi went into advertising, working as a copywriter and then a creative director at various advertising agencies in London and New York. Clients ranged from big and traditional, (AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, American Express, Unilever, Mercedes-Benz) to big and morally corrupt (R. J. Reynolds) to big and larcenous (Enron). Eventually she quit advertising, had three kids and started writing books, TV shows and screenplays, largely in order to get a moment’s peace.

Abbi lives in Los Angeles with her husband, three kids, three dogs, three cats, a gecko, two mice and six chickens. Every one of these additions made sense at the time, it’s only in retrospect that it seems foolhardy.

What did you think of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!