CHARACTER
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikryby Gabrielle Zevin

A. J. Fikry

A. J. Fikry

Quick Facts

Who He Is

At first glance, A. J. Fikry is the island’s resident curmudgeon—an erudite, prickly bookseller whose life has stalled in the aftermath of his wife’s death. He drinks too much, alienates well-meaning people, and hides behind taste as a shield. But the novel frames him as a man waiting to rejoin the world: a reader whose love of stories becomes a map back to community, parenthood, and romance. He is proof that a life can have a second act and that books are most alive when shared.

Personality & Traits

A.J.’s temperament is defined by sharp taste, sharper tongue, and a guarded heart. Grief has narrowed his world, but fatherhood and friendship pry it open. Importantly, his snark isn’t just comic color—it’s a defense mechanism masking tenderness, which emerges in care, curation, and commitment.

  • Curmudgeonly and opinionated: He opens the novel with a blistering anti-genre screed to a sales rep, announcing his disdain for “gimmicks” and certain memoirs. The rant is a moat around his grief, keeping people—and possibilities—at bay.
  • Intelligent and well-read: A former Ph.D. student, he treats literature as a serious vocation. Even when he “hates” his profession, his precise judgments and deep knowledge shape Island Books and the reading lives around him.
  • Isolated and grieving: Alcohol, routine, and sarcasm keep him numb after Nic’s death. His isolation embodies the novel’s tension between separation and connection.
  • Secretly tender-hearted: When he finds Maya, he chooses care over cynicism. The daily labor of parenting—feeding, reading, soothing—reveals a capacious, steady love.
  • Witty and dry: His sarcasm, often biting, doubles as self-protection and engagement, letting him test relationships before risking sincerity.

Character Journey

A.J.’s arc moves from withdrawal to wholeheartedness. The theft of his rare Poe, Tamerlane, strips away his escape hatch—he can’t sell it and disappear—forcing him to live with his pain rather than plan an elegant exit. Then Maya arrives. Choosing to keep and adopt her interrupts his self-destruction with routine, responsibility, and joy. As he rebuilds Island Books into a community hub, he moves from solitary reading to shared reading—book clubs, recommendations, conversations—embodying the store’s slow, outward bloom.

Amelia’s reentry completes his emotional thaw. Years after their disastrous first meeting, he finally reads her recommendation, The Late Bloomer, and phones to say he loved it; the call is an act of vulnerability masquerading as literary talk. Their relationship, rooted in delighting each other with books, becomes his model for love after loss: attentive, funny, and honest. When he’s diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, A.J. resists retreating into bitterness. Instead, he writes notes on short stories for Maya, turning his private canon into a legacy of connection. He concludes that literature’s truest gift isn’t escape—it’s the thread that ties people together.

Key Relationships

  • Nic Fikry: Nic is the missing center of the early chapters. Her death devastates A.J., and the bookstore they dreamed together becomes a mausoleum of taste and memory. His inability to move on testifies to the depth of their bond, but the novel insists that honoring Nic ultimately means continuing to live and love.

  • Maya Fikry: Maya is the hinge on which A.J.’s life turns. What begins as an emergency becomes a vocation: fatherhood reshapes his days, priorities, and tone. Their bond is intimate and playful (storytime, recommendations) and also ethical—she teaches him to choose commitment over retreat.

  • Amelia Loman: Their romance is a second-chance love built from literary conversation and sustained attention. Amelia challenges A.J.’s rigidity, and he meets her with growth: reading outside his comfort zone, apologizing sincerely, proposing imperfectly but wholeheartedly. Together they model how the Power of Books and Connection makes intimacy possible.

  • Chief Lambiase: What starts as a professional acquaintance becomes A.J.’s most quietly transformative friendship. Bonding over crime novels, they create a low-stakes space for vulnerability; A.J. mentors Lambiase as a reader, and Lambiase supports A.J. as a person. Their bookish hangouts mark A.J.’s reintegration into island life.

  • Ismay Evans-Parish (and Daniel Parish): Ismay ties A.J. to Nic’s memory while embodying the messiness of adult compromise. Through the turbulence of her marriage to Daniel, A.J. sees parallel paths he might have taken—resentment, avoidance, self-sabotage—and chooses, instead, responsibility and love.

Defining Moments

A.J.’s story pivots on a handful of scenes where taste gives way to tenderness, and isolation yields to community.

  • The Sales Pitch (Chapter 1): His hostile monologue to Amelia—funny, exacting, and rude—sets his baseline: a man using taste as armor. It’s memorable because the novel will later repurpose this same language of taste as a bridge, not a barrier.
  • The Theft of Tamerlane: Losing the rare Poe collection destroys his final contingency plan. Without an exit strategy, he must face the life he’s living. The loss nudges him toward presence rather than escape.
  • Finding Maya (Chapter 3): Discovering a toddler in his children’s section is the inciting miracle. Choosing to keep her reorders his habits and heart, transforming the store from a shrine into a living room for the island.
  • The Phone Call about The Late Bloomer (Chapter 5): Reading Amelia’s old rec—and admitting he loved it—is a confession disguised as a recommendation. It signals a willingness to be moved by others, the precondition of romance.
  • The Proposal (Chapter 7): He literally tosses the ring box—awkward, unpolished, utterly sincere. The scene captures his growth: he’s still brusque, but he’s all in.
  • The Diagnosis and the Final Project (Chapter 12): Facing brain cancer, he writes craft-notes on short stories for Maya. It’s his ultimate act of love and pedagogy: turning private taste into communal inheritance.

Symbolism & Significance

Island Books mirrors A.J.’s inner life. At first, its “very specific” inventory and neglect reflect his narrow grief; as he opens up, the store’s offerings and activities expand, becoming a communal hearth. A.J.’s evolution—from treating books as solitary refuge to using them as social glue—embodies the novel’s claim that while “no man is an island,” stories are the bridges back to the mainland.

Essential Quotes

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind... Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable.

This manifesto announces his persona—acerbic, exacting, wounded. The kicker about widower memoirs betrays his grief: he’s railing against a mirror. The novel will slowly unravel this armor until the same voice can make room for delight.

He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It’s completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin.

Here, comedy meets revelation. The fizzy metaphor—“carbonated”—captures the physiological shock of feeling again, while the profanity underscores how love disrupts self-destructive scripts. Love isn’t an idea; it’s a derailment.

When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.

A.J.’s proposal reframes intimacy as shared reading. He pledges not grand gestures but an ongoing conversation—the true currency of their bond. The specificity (books, talk) makes the romance feel lived-in and sustainable.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.

He translates literary form into existential insight. Lives, like anthologies, accrue meaning across pieces—grief beside joy, false starts beside triumphs. The line honors the fragmentary while insisting on a coherent, loving whole.

We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.

A.J.’s final credo overturns his earlier material and aesthetic fixations. Taste matters, but love outlasts it. The statement becomes both epitaph and instruction, directing Maya—and the reader—toward what remains.