Set in the present day, The Magic Bookshop is about a small dingy rundown city second-hand bookshop, The Sole Antiquarian, inherited by the reclusive proprietor from a Victorian ancestor, who originally presented it as an attraction with a travelling fair. The books hold a mystical and time travelling power, each one able to fulfil as a work of fiction their unwitting reader’s deepest secret.
A fairground theme provides intimate dream-like metaphorical reflections on relationships, fragility, regret, death, love and sex amid the environment of the modern world.
The Magic Bookshop may be classed, hesitantly, as an opera in that the story is told entirely in song.