"This is a novella about books and obsession. Yet it is a story that all book lovers must read and read obsessively."

"It begins with the premise that “books change people’s destinies.” This profound and indubitable observation follows the curious death of Bluma Lennon, professor of literature in Cambridge, who, on a spring day in 1998, stepped out of a bookshop in Soho having bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems and was knocked down dead by a car at the first street corner as she was reading the second poem."

Read this article.