Sophie Bernstein is losing the will to keep the lights turned on at the celebrated independent bookstore she owns. But she doesn't want to leave. Recently widowed, jittery about current events, and shaken by rereading Anne Frank's diary, she hires a handyman to prepare a secret room behind the fiction section for the day they come for her. Meanwhile, she presides over a staff of highly educated, underpaid millennials whose youthful angst, on-the-job antics, and amorous pursuits are chronicled in the End of Day Report- a daily document that records events from book sales at author talks to mishaps involving the store's overpriced and underperforming vacuum cleaner.
Among her key employees is Clemi, a liberal arts graduate and aspiring novelist who runs the store's events, which at the moment, are cursed by all number of problems including late authors, drunk authors, and running out of books. An unexpected chance to meet her birth father for the first time pops up, and Clemi's personal and professional life are at risk of becoming impossibly muddled.
The diverse cast of characters in this intergenerational comedy also includes Jamal, the store manager who is now on his way to the University of Chicago law school, Raymond, a renowned but reviled poet, Summer, a veteran of NASA and Barnes & Noble, who posts dramatic but cryptic "vaguebook" messages on social media, Noah, a hipster poseur, and spooky Florence, Clemi's troubled roommate. Also: a Russian Tortoise named David Foster Wallace.
Action unfurls rapidly over one week, bookended by events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the solar eclipse. Neither Sophie nor Clemi will ever be the same.
