Q&A with Lily Braun-Arnold, Author of January/February Kids’ Indie Next List Top Pick “The Last Bookstore on Earth”

“An engaging YA novel about a young woman riding out a post-apocalyptic world in the bookstore where she worked pre-Storm. A nice mix of trials and tribulations with wry humor and a sweet budding sapphic romance. I was hooked from the first chapter,” said Jean Bartz of Books on Main in Friendship, Wisconsin.

Bookselling This Week: First of all, congratulations. I'd love to talk a little about your creation of The Last Bookstore on Earth. It sounds like you've been writing for your whole life. But the creation of this book was very quick. Your TikTok said you wrote this all in just 15 days?

Lily Braun-Arnold: Yes! So during COVID, I wrote my first book. And after that, every summer I would sit and write a book. I did this three summers in a row.

I'm very much a mood writer. I have to strike while the iron is hot, in terms of getting stuff done and finishing it. And for this book in particular, I had the idea while I was at work at the bookstore. 

The power went out, and my friend made a joke about how people would still keep coming in even during the end of the world.

I was like, “That's a great idea,” because I was already apocalypse-obsessed, and that was just combining my favorite things.

I was actively graduating high school while that was going on. I wrote every day for 15 days — with the biggest pushes on the weekends, obviously. I would just write all day. Two weeks later, I had a book in my hands. It definitely needed edits, but the first draft was really in those two weeks.

BTW: That's amazing. I'd love to hear more about your protagonists. Liz and Maeve, at the beginning, are occupying entirely different worlds. Liz is more passive, she’s sheltered, and Maeve is very much not. Was there one that was easier to write, or one that you identified with more?

LBA: Obviously, publishing is a slow-moving industry. Now I'm 20, but I started writing at 17.

In the beginning, I was like, “Oh, I'm so Liz.” That’s really who I identified with as I was writing, especially because I was getting ready to go to college. A lot of the feelings that I had surrounding that — “I’m scared of change. I don’t want things to be different.” — was encapsulated within Liz’s character.

As time has passed, I've found myself relating more to Maeve and her impulsiveness. She really likes to seize opportunities, she's very opinionated — for better or for worse — and she's very vocal about those opinions.

So that's sort of a cop-out answer to say, “Oh, both of them.”

BTW: You said you're kind of apocalypse-obsessed. I need to hear more about this.

LBA: I mean obviously everyone had a dystopian phase. I feel like if you read enough YA, you had that phase. When I read Divergent, I was like, “This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

It definitely started with a love of dystopian books (and movie adaptations of those books). During COVID, I was at home and I was binge watching, because suddenly I had oodles of time on my hands. What are you going to do except immerse yourself in media?

So, I watched The Hundred. I love it in spite of the fact that it’s not a perfect show. And because of that, I really started liking post-apocalyptic stories rather than dystopian, even though I think the two genres are very adjacent. And from there, that was all I would consume. Station Eleven, The 5th Wave, The Last of Us, all of that stuff.

Part of it was because I find the apocalypse to be a very comforting genre. I don't know if that's everyone's take away from it. I had a creative writing professor who looked at me like I had two heads when I said that to her.

I think witnessing characters in the worst possible situation — literally the destruction of everything — and having those characters continue to move forward and find small moments of joy amidst all of that is really beautiful.

BTW: How did you decide what your specific apocalypse was going to be? For me, it stood out from some of the apocalyptic stories that we have seen.

LBA: In my very first drafts of this story, I didn't actually define what the apocalypse was. I was like, “I'm going to write this apocalypse story and I'm not going to focus on the actual destruction.”

But as I kept going, I was like, “We need to define what it was that ended the world.”

I was trying to think of something that feels timely and pressing. If you read apocalyptic stories from the ‘60s, it's very much influenced by the Cold War and the nuclear scares of the time. Same thing with crazy AI robot stories, those really started coming to the forefront of the genre once that was a more modern concern. And as someone who's growing up in this time, a lot of what I was concerned with was climate change.

I was in my senior year, in my environmental science class, and we were talking about acid rain. (Which does not actually operate the way that it operates in the book. It will cause harm to water supplies and flora and fauna, but it's not melting people's skin off.) So, I took something that is absolutely a concern in the present and magnified it for my purposes within the book.

BTW: Obviously, books are a huge part of your life. You're a reader, an indie bookseller, and now an author. Do you have any favorite memories of indie bookstores that you’d like to share with us?

LBA: I've been an indie bookstore enthusiast probably since I popped out of the womb. I grew up in New York City and my parents would take me to Books of Wonder on the weekends. (I would wreak havoc and eat their books — I was a heinous child.) Now, in New Jersey, the bookstore that I work at — Watchung Booksellers — is literally a few blocks away from my house.

When I was a kid, my sister and I would walk past the bookstore and the little bakery next door. We were like, “One day we’ll work there.” My sister is a wonderful cook and a wonderful baker. She’d work at the restaurant and I’d work at the bookstore, and that was heaven to me.

My junior year of high school, I finally applied to the bookstore. It was like a dream come true that I was able to work there. It is my favorite place on earth.

The people there are wonderful. The books that I get to read and talk about are wonderful. And the customers are wonderful.

That’s what I really love about indie bookstores, the community that they have. (That's something I did try to establish within my book.) You just have such strong connections with these people, and indie bookstores become such an important part of the community in a really wonderful way by hosting events and authors.

They create a really wonderful community and a place that I call home for myself. And that's something I'm forever grateful to indie bookstores for.