Shelf Life

The call came when popular local author Suzanne Strempek Shea was sitting squished up in an armchair one Saturday afternoon in 2001. It was Janet Edwards, owner of Edwards Bookstore in Springfield. She needed someone to work at the store an afternoon or two a week. Could Ms. Shea help spread the word?

She wasn't asking Ms. Shea to take the job because she knew she really needed to work on the novel she owed her publisher. And there were health issues. A year earlier Ms. Shea had been diagnosed with breast cancer and undergone extensive radiation therapy, which left her with bouts of fatigue she still battles occasionally. She had been sitting around the house wondering what she would do with her future, now that the apparently successful treatments had given her one.

Ms. Shea hung up the phone. Several possible candidates passed through her mind before she happened upon the perfect one. She called Ms. Edwards back. "How about me?' she asked.

"You need to write," Ms. Edwards said.

"I need to get out of here,'" Ms. Shea answered.

So she went to work at Edwards, a move that ensured she would get out of the house at least one day a week. And she did write, tooa book on her bookselling experiences that tells, in a delightful and engaging way, of her experiences as a novice bookseller based on her time at Edwards and the hundreds of stores she has visited nationwide while on book tours for her novels.

Ms. Shea will sign copies of the book, "Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and other Page-Turning Adventures from a year in a Bookstore," (Beacon Press, $20, hardcover) at two local venues not unlike the independent bookstore that inspired the book. She will be at Tatnuck Bookseller, 335 Chandler St., Worcester, at 7 p.m. Thursday; and at the Booklover's Gourmet, 55 East Main St., Webster, from 1:30 to 3 p.m. May 22.

Ms. Shea , the winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of four novels, "Selling the Lite of Heaven," "Hoopi Shoopi Donna," "Lily of the Valley," and "Around Again," and the memoir "Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: NotesHigh and Lowfrom My Journey through Breast Cancer and Radiation." She lives in the Bondsville section of Palmer.

"It's going really well,'' she said, by cell phone recently as she rode the Mass Turnpike from Palmer to a publicity gig in Boston. (Her husband, Springfield Republican columnist Tom Shea, was doing the driving.) "It's interesting because 'Songs' was my first nonfiction book and I was very close to it. But with this book, I feel happier about the topic, for apparent reasons, and so for me it's wonderful to see that others are finding that too. I've gotten better reviews and comments on this than I have on most things that I've written."

The book is alternately tenderly insightful and downright funny. Ms. Shea, 45, has been on book tours that have taken her from coast to coast.

In one stretch of 12 months, she made no fewer than 200 appearances in bookstores, book fairs, libraries, church picnics and hospital gift shops, inside and outside in all weather.

And we mean all weather.

A reading at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley coincided with a hurricane warning. Ms. Shea called the store owner to find out when she wanted to reschedule the reading as the trees in her yard began to dance in the wind. "People have been calling," the store owner said. "They say they'll come if you will."

"I had nothing planned but a night hiding out in my basement with a transistor radio and a bag of Doritos, so I hopped in my car," Ms. Shea writes. "The way I saw it, and as this very sentence proves, a reading in a hurricane would make a story somewhere down the line." (About a dozen people showed up)

A poignant moment came when Ms. Shea, before she worked at Edwards, stopped into the bookstore as a customer, just after her first novel was published.

"I can still see her (Janet Edwards) standing at the right hand side of the counter, handing an Ohio salesman my book with the guarantees 'If you don't like it you can bring it back, but I promise you you're going to love it.'"

"At first I thought she must have seen me come in, but there was no way she could have,'' Ms. Shea said. "I was totally amazed. I didn't know her that well at the time and she was doing this for me. I've tried to return the favor. There are authors that I may never meet and I'm continuously bringing people over to their books and saying 'You've got to read this.' or 'You've got to add this to your shelf.' I think this is one thing that makes small bookstores such special places."

She's been in hundreds, but each is unique, she said, including the two local ones she will visit.

"It's really great,'' she said of the tiny Booklover's Gourmet, where she has read once before. "It has all these different hallways and sections and a little cafe area. It's very intimate. It's one of those places where you really feel at home, and book clubs meet there and it's just like sitting in somebody's living room."

Tatnuck also is very much its own place. "You hear about how Tatnuck started in this tiny little store, and look at it now. It's got all these little sections and it's unique. I've been fortunate enough to see hundreds of places and I can't compare anything to either one of them."

But, unique as each is, independent bookstores do have a few things in common.

"It's basically the spirit of themand nothing against the bigger stores, because they've been great to me, toobut when you walk in these small stores, someone will actually approach you and even if you don't know what you want they 'll start leading you around and say 'I read this' or 'this is just in,' or 'let me run out back and check.'

"It's just really wonderful, the one-to-one contact you get when you walk into a place like that."