Welcome, friend! Today I am chatting with author Sarah Chamberlain, about her latest book, Love Walked In. If you have ever dreamed of owning a bookstore, you will love the setting of this book! Read more below about the story and enjoy the interview!
Let me know in the comments if you will be reading the book. I am excited to bring you the review. 🙂
Love Walked In
A sunshine American bookstore whisperer clashes with the grumpy British owner of the shop she’s trying to save in this winning opposites-attract romance for book lovers.
He has a struggling bookshop. She has a knack for bringing bookstores back to life. As soon as she walks into his store, all bets are off…
Mari Cole’s whole life is her dream rescuing and revitalizing indie bookstores. Friendship? Love? No thanks. After a hard childhood, she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone. Besides, books have never let Mari down the way people have.Then she gets the offer of a rescuing Ross & Co. Once the most prestigious independent booksellers in London, the store is a shadow of its former self and needs an expert outsider to turn things around. But the offer turns out to be a double-edged Leo Ross, the store’s new owner, is as cold and hostile as the British winter.
For as long as he can remember, Leo Ross has known his future is becoming the next generation to run Ross and Co. He’s sacrificed almost everything he cares about, but the bookshop is still failing on his watch, and now there’s an obnoxiously cheerful American woman convinced that she’s going to magically make everything better. Leo’s life is difficult and messy enough as it is, and he doesn’t want her help.
When Mari and Leo are forced to work closely together to bring the store back to life, Leo’s icy surface thaws to reveal the passionate man underneath. As the cold winter gives way to the possibility of new beginnings, Mari begins to see that true love could be even better in real life than in the pages of a book. Can they put their pasts aside and learn to let love in?
Get to know the author: Sarah Chamberlain
Hi Sarah! Welcome to Armed with a Book. To start us off, can you introduce yourself to my readers?
Hello there! I write contemporary romance with smart, highly competent heroines, lots of banter, and a bit of spice. Love Walked In is my second book – my debut The Slowest Burn came out in September 2024.
I was a romance reader long before I was a romance writer, and I particularly love slow burns and lots and lots of yearning.
When I’m not reading or writing, I love to cook, watch old movies, and powerlift. I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay Area but currently live in London.
Where are Mari and Leo emotionally when we first meet them in Love Walked In, and how did you want readers to feel about each of them?
Frankly, Leo Ross is having a no good, very bad year, and things aren’t looking up when Mari storms in the door of his bookstore. Mari on the other hand feels like her life is going just great, and she’s this close to achieving her dream back in California, if she just keeps pushing.
On the surface, this looks very much like a classic grumpy/sunshine situation, but I wanted to interrogate that a little bit – as Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes, and there’s usually interesting reasons why one person is more pessimistic or optimistic than another. More than anything I want readers to be intrigued by these two people and wonder both how they got to this point in their lives and where they’re going.
Leo is carrying a lot of grief and professional pressure. How did you approach writing a character who’s guarded but still relatable?
Well, we all struggle sometimes – with sadness, with anxiety, with loss. And yes, some people cope with that by expressing it in immediately healthy ways, which is great, of course! But that’s not true for everyone. Speaking from personal experience, sometimes you just want so badly for things to be OK that you just put your head down and try to push through the hard stuff without asking for help. It was important to me to write in Leo’s POV because someone in his situation can seem like a real jerk (as he does to Mari initially), when in truth he’s just trying his hardest not to drown.
The London bookshop setting feels so vivid. Was Ross & Co. inspired by a real store?
Yes, very much so! It has several London bookstores in its DNA. Its main inspiration is Marks and Co. from Helene Hanff’s book 84 Charing Cross Road, which sadly no longer exists. I also spent a lot of time hanging out at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, Waterstones Gower Street in Bloomsbury, Daunt Books in Marylebone and John Sandoe Books in Chelsea.
Mari believes that books aren’t anything without people. I want to ask your thoughts on a similar parallel – What do you see as the relationship between writers and readers?
The best metaphor I’ve heard for this is that writing a book is like raising a child: you work your absolute hardest for a long time, do the best job you can in caring and forming your book/kid…and then they come of age and you send them out into the wide world to make their way without you. Once the book I wrote goes to print, it isn’t really mine anymore. It has a whole new life once it’s in readers’ hands, and it’s theirs to make of what they will. That said, it’s a real joy to get emails from readers saying how they connected with the book – it makes this whole process feel a little less lonely.
Mari borrows often from novels to describe the feel of things, from bookstores to the weather. Do you have a favorite literary reference in the book?
Eva Ibbotson is a hugely underrated romance writer, and I couldn’t resist sliding in a mention of my favorite book by her, The Morning Gift. I also mention Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose Cazalet Chronicles are an incredible five book family saga.
How can a casual reader balance supporting bookstores and libraries?
I don’t view it as a balance, more a “why choose?” situation! Certainly buy books from indie bookstores whenever and wherever you can, but I also highly recommend browsing your local library’s stacks the same way you would browse in a bookstore. I have found some really cool things in the stacks that I wouldn’t find in an average bookstore, either because they’re from a more obscure publisher or because they’ve been out of print for ages.
What was your favorite scene to write, and why?
The scene where Mari and Leo are on a crowded Tube train stuck in a tunnel was one of the first things I drafted, and it always makes me smile when I read it. Every single Londoner has been on a train that gets stopped in a tunnel for too long, and it’s just the perfect moment to force these two stubborn characters together and build tension.
If you could open your own indie bookstore anywhere in the world, where would it be and what would the vibe be like? (Bonus: what would we find on its staff’s pick shelf?)
My hometown’s only bookstore closed when I was ten, and I’d love to reopen one there just so kids like me would have somewhere exciting and cozy to explore and browse.
Or I’d open one on Lamb’s Conduit Street here in London. It’s the most beautiful villagey, tree-lined street in Bloomsbury, not far from where Love Walked In is set, and it’s just crying out for a small but mighty bookstore.
And let’s be honest, the staff picks would be almost all romance novels and cookbooks!
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and share with my readers.
Thanks for joining us! Add this book on Goodreads. It will be available now!
Many thanks to St. Martin’s Griffin for connecting me with the author and giving me a chance to highlight this book on my blog in exchange for an honest review. 🙂
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