Meet Izzy and her sister Margot: one a verified book nerd, the other not so much. When they find an unfinished manuscript in the attic of their late mother's mango farm in Queensland, Australia and discover that their mother had a year abroad in the UK when she was a young student - and, while there, embarked on an attempt to solve the famous Great British Bookshop Treasure Hunt of 1984 - so begins an odyssey that will change everything.

With Margot pregnant with her first child, Izzy travels alone to the UK to visit all the bookshops on the treasure hunt trail and attempt to track down a mysterious boy from her mother's past. Meeting a group of book nerds, she joins them on their 'bookshop crawls' around the UK, from Brighton to Cardiff to Hay-on-Wye to Bradford to Belfast to Edinburgh, while they help her to solve the clues they find there. Along the way, Izzy will come to terms with the grief of losing her mother, miss Margot . . . and fall in love with a bookshop boy all of her own.