Camino Island was published by Doubleday in 2017, and it represents Grisham’s most charming departure from formula — a novel set in the world of rare books, independent bookstores, and the literary life rather than in courtrooms and law offices. The plot begins with the theft of the original manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s five novels from the Firestone Library at Princeton University, and follows the attempt to recover them through the world of black-market rare book dealing.
The central figure is Bruce Cable, the proprietor of a bookstore on the fictional Camino Island (off the Florida coast), who is suspected of being the fence for the stolen manuscripts. Mercer Mann, a young novelist struggling financially, is recruited by the insurance company to befriend Cable and determine whether he has the manuscripts. The result is a novel about the book world — writers, readers, collectors, dealers, and the people who love books enough to steal them.
Grisham clearly enjoys writing about the literary world: the novel includes an independent bookstore as its moral center, a community of writers as its social world, and the physical beauty of rare books as its aesthetic subject. The Fitzgerald manuscripts — handwritten drafts of The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and others — are treated with a reverence that reflects genuine bibliophilia.
Collecting Camino Island
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 2017): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $8–$20
- Signed first edition: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $3–$8