"Sixpence House is the bookworm’s answer to A Year in Provence." -Boston Globe Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the "Town of Books" that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of the author’s own first book, Sixpence House becomes a heartfelt and often hilarious meditation on what books mean to us. A #1 Book Sense Pick "A delightful book."-Los Angeles Times "Collins’ gift is that you don’t care where you end up. The journey is enough."-Readerville "The real, engaging heart of the tale is Collins’ love of books and other people who love them…Collins muses on antiquarian books the way the rest of us remember lost loves."-San Francisco Chronicle "Funny, informative, somewhat chaotic and full of interesting references…there are numerous meanders into peripheral subjects, seen through the astute eyes of an Anglophile American."-Washington Post