The Spellshop
Kiela has spent her adult life as a quiet librarian in the Great Library of Alyssium, hidden among the stacks with her sentient spider-plant familiar Caz. When revolution sets the capital on fire, she packs as many forbidden spellbooks as she can carry and flees to her childhood home, a small island called Caltrey she has not seen in decades. To make rent she opens a jam shop in her grandmother's empty cottage. To survive she starts secretly selling spells out of the back, drawing the attention of a kind bear-shaped neighbor named Larrian, a flying horse with a sweet tooth, and the slowly rebuilding community of the island.
Where The Spellshop keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about The Spellshop
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A librarian flees a burning capital with her sentient spider-plant familiar and a stack of forbidden spellbooks, and opens a jam-and-spell shop on a small island.
Yes. The Spellshop is part of the cozy fantasy wave alongside Legends and Lattes and Can't Spell Treason Without Tea. The premise centers on a librarian fleeing political collapse to open a magical spell shop.
Yes. Sarah Beth Durst has continued the world with The Bakery of Wishes and Magic and a planned series. Each entry stays in cozy territory.
The Spellshop was written by Sarah Beth Durst, published in 2024 by Tor.
The Spellshop is 374 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Spellshop takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Spellshop is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
