In Mumbai, bookstores run more on nostalgia, and less on money. It's perhaps the only fuel that keeps them going. TN Shanbhag's iconic Strand Book Stall in Fort, which shuttered last year, and Smoker's Corner, a stone's throw away—started by the late Suleman Botawala in the 1950s—still manage to ignite fond memories. Stories of conversations with the unassuming bookseller. The smell of paper and print. The chaotic arrangement of books. The feeling of belonging.

Rehana Munir's debut novel, Paper Moon (HarperCollins India), has similar recall value. It won't take you back to the socialist days of Shanbhag and Botawala when bookselling was tough, yet fulfilling, but the post-liberal, all-embracing early 21st century India, where competition in business is sport.

Munir's protagonist is Fiza Khalid, a fresh-out-of-grad school woman, who discovers that the father she never knew, has died and left her a tidy sum in the hope that she will open a bookshop. Having studied literary greats at St Xavier's College, under inspiring English literature professor Frances D'Monte—a character modelled on Xavier's beloved professor Eunice de Souza—Fiza suddenly realises that her father's dream, is hers too. She rents an old bungalow in Bandra, naming it Paper Moon, and begins her bookselling journey.