I first read Helene Hanff’s lovely 84, Charing Cross Road in the summer of 2024, and I fell for it completely. I was just as delighted — indeed, even more delighted — to return to it earlier this year for our library book club. I loved it so much that I immediately sought out two more of Hanff’s books, including The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, a follow-up of sorts.

For those unfamiliar, 84, Charing Cross Road is composed of letters exchanged over more than two decades, beginning in 1949, between Hanff and Frank Doel, a bookseller at the now-vanished-but-for-a-plaque London antiquarian shop Marks & Co. What begins as a correspondence about books soon widens into something richer: Hanff befriends Doel’s coworkers, family members, and even neighbors through her wit, warmth, and the care packages she sends across the Atlantic. Yet for all the affection and longing packed into those letters, and for all the promises of visiting “next year,” Hanff never makes it to England during the period the book records. As she writes, “Year after year I’d planned a pilgrimage to London, only to have it canceled at the last minute by some crisis, usually financial.”

That long-deferred journey finally becomes possible only after 84, Charing Cross Road is published, when her publishers invite Hanff to London to help promote it. And what a gift that turns out to be for readers, since the trip is preserved in her daily journal entries in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, a book that, like its predecessor, surprised me with its wit and warmth.

It’s June 1971, and the book opens with a brief introduction in which Hanff expresses her anxiety about finally going to London. It ends with a friend’s simple advice: “Keep a diary.” From the very first entry, I knew I was in for a treat. There she is, anxious as she lands. There she is meeting people she’s corresponded with for years but never seen (Nora Doel even calls her Helen — ha!). There she is, disoriented and wary as she’s driven to her hotel: “It was dark and rainy as we drove along the highway that might have been any highway leading to any city, instead of the road to the one city I’d waited a lifetime to see.” And there she is at midnight in her room, discovering that what she feels is not bliss at all. What if this trip she’s always looked forward to ultimately means nothing?

I lie here listening to the rain, and nothing is real. I’m in a pleasant hotel room that could be anywhere. After all the years of waiting, no sense at all of being in London. Just a feeling of letdown, and my insides offering the opinion that the entire trip was unnecessary.

It’s not a spoiler to say that her fears are unfounded. London becomes what she hoped it would be, and I loved following her days there, one by one. I want to close by sharing a passage from the end of the book, which beautifully captures the peculiar despair of knowingly leaving an idyll:

The plane lifted — and suddenly it was as if everything had vanished: Bloomsbury and Regent’s Park and Russell Square and Rutland Gate. None of it had happened, none of it was real. Even the people weren’t real. It was all imagined, they were all phantoms.

I sit here on the plane trying to see faces, trying to hold onto London, but the mind intrudes with thoughts of home: the mail piled up waiting for me, the people waiting, the world waiting.

The other Hanff book I picked up is Q’s Legacy, in which, I understand, she expands on the story of how she first reached out to Marks & Co. I have a strong feeling I’m going to love that one too.