Fine Print

Rae Sato is a graphic designer who creates beautiful things for other people and cannot design her own life. She moved to Ashby, North Carolina, because it was the third result on a search engine. She has a bedsheet for a curtain. She has a lime in her refrigerator that has transcended fruit and become a companion. She does not make decisions. She drifts into them.

When her ex-boyfriend announces his wedding in her adopted town, Rae does what any reasonable person with access to Illustrator would do: she designs a twelve-page document for a fake relationship, complete with Pantone swatches, a physical contact escalation graph, four color-coded exit strategies, and a section titled "Appropriate Physical Contact Escalation Timeline."

Jonah Wilder shoes horses, reads Westerns at the bookshop counter, and has been watching the woman at the corner table for four months without saying a word. When Claire Keller asks him to be Rae's plus-one, he says yes before she finishes the sentence. He has read Jane Austen's Persuasion eleven times. He has told no one.

She designed twelve pages about how to pretend. He practiced for six months to say one sentence.

Fine Print is the tenth novel in The Bookshop on Main series, a warm, funny, occasionally devastating story about a woman who designs everything except her own life, a man who has been invisible by choice, and a bookshop in the Blue Ridge foothills where the right book finds the right reader. If the reader is lucky, the book comes with a farrier who puts out candles with his bare hands and holds yours when it feels right.

No graph required.